read extern drive in ubuntu

[Douglas Pollard]

Yes Tony, I was thinking Open office could read them and then I could 
save them to a file Widows office could read. I think that is what she 
uses. Does this work? I assumed the formatting of the writing itself 
might be lost and then she would have to go through and reformat that 
like paragraphs , words per line and right or left side justification.  
Might even have to pick out the sentences out of the lines of 
formatting??   Doug



On 06/28/2010 11:10 AM, Tony Pursell wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 16:02 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>    
>> On 28 June 2010 15:38, Douglas Pollard<dougpol1 at verizon.net>  wrote:
>>      
>>> Sorry guys I guess I was not very clear.  She will send me her hard
>>> drive and I intend to put it in my empty external drive case and read it
>>> with Ubuntu and copy it.   I can send them by email as files or write to
>>> dvd and mail to her.  This info is on a pretty small hard drive I think
>>> as it is old.  Everyone is telling her that she can only get the files
>>> off and read them with a Mac computer.  I don't know what kind of file
>>> system Mac uses or if the advice she has been given is correct.  It's my
>>> understanding that you can put Ubuntu on a Mac and move the personal
>>> files to Ubuntu.  I just want to be sure I can work with the Mac files
>>> or convert them to something Ubuntu can work with.        Doug
>>>        
>> It's OK, I follow you.
>>
>> Yes, it should work.
>>
>> Macs use a disk format called HFS (for *very* old Macs) and HFS+ (for
>> anything since the mid-to-late 1990s). Ubuntu reads HFS+ fine,
>> straight out of the box in my experience - I did not need to add any
>> additional software or anything.
>>
>> One thing that threw me: if you attach the Mac hard disk, the kernel
>> will list it and the partitions on it. You might want to take a note
>> of this.
>>
>> With a PC hard disk, you can run "fdisk" or "sfdisk -l" or something
>> like that to list the partitions on a drive. This won't work on a Mac
>> drive, because it doesn't have a PC partition map. Mac partition maps
>> are different, but Ubuntu can read them - it's just that the Ubuntu
>> partitioning tools can't.
>>
>> You should be fine. Plug in the drive and it should mount the disks
>> and you'll be away. You probably won't need any of this stuff I'm
>> mentioning.
>>
>>      
> Everyone has concentrated on the file system and assure you that you can
> mount it an see what files are on it, but how about the format of the
> files themselves.  You imply that you will want to read them, perhaps
> with OpenOffice.
>
> Tony
>