You’ve loaded the Ubuntu Live CD to recover files from a failed system but where do you store the recovered files? We’ll show you how to store them on external hard drives, on the same PC, a Windows home network, and other places.

There are many ways to transfer files you can access from a Ubuntu Live CD to a location that a stable machine Windows can not access them.

We’ll go through several methods, from each section from the Ubuntu desktop.

Use a healthy hard disk

If your computer has more than one hard disk or your hard drive is healthy and you’re in Ubuntu for reasons of non-payment, then access your hard drive is easy as pie, even if the hard disk is formatted for Windows.

To access a disk drive, it must first be mounted. To mount a floppy drive healthy, you simply select it in the Places menu in the top left of the screen. You must identify your hard disk size.

Clicking on the appropriate hard drive mounts it, and opens it in a file browser.

You can now move files to the hard drive by drag and drop or copy and paste, which are both done the same way they are done in Windows.

Once a hard drive or other external storage device is mounted, it will be displayed in the directory / media. To see the list of storage devices currently installed, navigate to / media by clicking on the file system in a Windows file browser, then double-clicking the folder media..

Right now, our media folder contains links to the hard drive, which Ubuntu has assigned a terribly uninformative label, and the PLoP Boot Manager CD that is currently in the CD-ROM drive.

Connect a USB Hard Drive or Flash Drive

A USB external hard drive gives you the advantage of portability, and is still large enough to store a deposit of entire hard disk, if necessary. Flash drives are also very easy to connect, if they are limited in how far they can store.

When you plug a USB hard disk or flash drive in, Ubuntu should automatically detect and mount it. It can even open a file browser automatically. Since it was installed, you will also see the show on the desktop and the folder / media.

Once it’s been mounted, you can access it and store files on it like you would any other folder in Ubuntu.

If, for whatever reason, it doesn’t mount automatically, click on Places in the top-left of your screen and select your USB device. If it does not show up in the Places list, then you may need to format your USB drive.

To properly remove the USB drive when you’re done moving files, right click on the desktop icon or the folder in /media and select Safely Remove Drive. If you’re not given that option, then Eject or Unmount will effectively do the same thing.

Connect to a Windows PC on your Local Network

If you have another PC or a laptop connected through the same router (wired or wireless) then you can transfer files over the network relatively quickly.

To do this, we will share one or more folders from the machine booted up with the Ubuntu Live CD over the network, letting our Windows PC grab the files contained in that folder. As an example, we’re going to share a folder on the desktop called ToShare.

Right-click on the folder you want to share, and click Sharing Options. A Folder Sharing window will pop up.

Check the box labeled Share this folder. A window will pop up about the sharing service. Click the Install service button.

Some files will be downloaded, and then installed. When they’re done installing, you’ll be appropriately notified.

You will be prompted to restart your session. Don’t worry, this won’t actually log you out, so go ahead and press the Restart session button.

The Folder Sharing window returns, with Share this folder now checked. Edit the Share name if you’d like, and add checkmarks in the two checkboxes below the text fields. Click Create Share.

Nautilus will ask your permission to add some permissions to the folder you want to share. Allow it to Add the permissions automatically.

The folder is now shared, as evidenced by the new arrows above the folder’s icon.

At this point, you are done with the Ubuntu machine. Head to your Windows PC, and open up Windows Explorer. Click on Network in the list on the left, and you should see a machine called UBUNTU in the right pane.

Note: This example is shown in Windows 7; the same steps should work for Windows XP and Vista, but we have not tested them.

Double-click on UBUNTU, and you will see the folder you shared earlier! As well as any other folders you’ve shared from Ubuntu.

Double click on the folder you want to access, and from there, you can move the files from the machine booted with Ubuntu to your Windows PC.

Upload to an Online Service

There are many services online that will allow you to upload files, either temporarily or permanently. As long as you aren’t transferring an entire hard drive, these services should allow you to transfer your important files from the Ubuntu environment to any other machine with Internet access.

We recommend compressing the files that you want to move, both to save a little bit of bandwidth, and to save time clicking on files, as uploading a single file will be much less work than a ton of little files.

To compress one or more files or folders, select them, and then right-click on one of the members of the group. Click Compress….

Give the compressed file a suitable name, and then select a compression format. We’re using .zip because we can open it anywhere, and the compression rate is acceptable.

Click Create and the compressed file will show up in the location selected in the Compress window.

Dropbox

If you have a Dropbox account, then you can easily upload files from the Ubuntu environment to Dropbox. There is no explicit limit on the size of file that can be uploaded to Dropbox, though a free account begins with a total limit of 2 GB of files in total.

Access your account through Firefox, which can be opened by clicking on the Firefox logo to the right of the System menu at the top of the screen.

Once into your account, press the Upload button on top of the main file list.

Because Flash is not installed in the Live CD environment, you will have to switch to the basic uploader. Click Browse…find your compressed file, and then click Upload file.

Depending on the size of the file, this could take some time. However, once the file has been uploaded, it should show up on any computer connected through Dropbox in a matter of minutes.

Google Docs

Google Docs allows the upload of any type of file – making it an ideal place to upload files that we want to access from another computer. While your total allocation of space varies (mine is around 7.5 GB), there is a per-file maximum of 1 GB.

Log into Google Docs, and click on the Upload button at the top left of the page.

Click Select files to upload and select your compressed file. For safety’s sake, uncheck the checkbox concerning converting files to Google Docs format, and then click Start upload.

Go Online – Through FTP

If you have access to an FTP server – perhaps through your web hosting company, or you’ve set up an FTP server on a different machine – you can easily access the FTP server in Ubuntu and transfer files. Just make sure you don’t go over your quota if you have one.

You will need to know the address of the FTP server, as well as the login information.

Click on Places > Connect to Server…

Choose the FTP (with login) Service type, and fill in your information. Adding a bookmark is optional, but recommended.

You will be asked for your password. You can choose to remember it until you logout, or indefinitely.

You can now browse your FTP server just like any other folder. Drop files into the FTP server and you can retrieve them from any computer with an Internet connection and an FTP client.

Conclusion

While at first the Ubuntu Live CD environment may seem claustrophobic, it has a wealth of options for connecting to peripheral devices, local computers, and machines on the Internet – and this article has only scratched the surface. Whatever the storage medium, Ubuntu’s got an interface for it!

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Deleting files or quickly formatting a drive isn’t enough for sensitive personal information. We’ll show you how to get rid of it for good using a Ubuntu Live CD.

When you delete a file in Windows, Ubuntu, or any other operating system, it doesn’t actually destroy the data stored on your hard drive, it just marks that data as “deleted.” If you overwrite it later, then that data is generally unrecoverable, but if the operating system don’t happen to overwrite it, then your data is still stored on your hard drive, recoverable by anyone who has the right software.

By securely delete files or entire hard drives, your data will be gone for good.

Note: Modern hard drives are extremely sophisticated, as are the experts who recover data for a living. There is no guarantee that the methods covered in this article will make your data completely unrecoverable; however, they will make your data unrecoverable to the majority of recovery methods, and all methods that are readily available to the general public.

Shred individual files

Most of the data stored on your hard drive is harmless, and doesn’t reveal anything about you. If there are just a few files that you know you don’t want someone else to see, then the easiest way to get rid of them is a built-in Linux utility called shred.

Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications at the top-left of the screen, then expanding the Accessories menu and clicking on Terminal.

Navigate to the file that you want to delete using cd to change directories and ls to list the files and folders in the current directory.

As an example, we’ve got a file called BankInfo.txt on a Windows NTFS-formatted hard drive.

We want to delete it securely, so we’ll call shred by entering the following in the terminal window:

shred <file>

which is, in our example:

shred BankInfo.txt

Notice that our BankInfo.txt file still exists, even though we’ve shredded it. A quick look at the contents of BankInfo.txt make it obvious that the file has indeed been securely overwritten.

We can use some command-line arguments to make shred delete the file from the hard drive as well. We can also be extra-careful about the shredding process by upping the number of times shred overwrites the original file.

To do this, in the terminal, type in:

shred –remove –iterations=<num> <file>

By default, shred overwrites the file 25 times. We’ll double this, giving us the following command:

shred –remove –iterations=50 BankInfo.txt

BankInfo.txt has now been securely wiped on the physical disk, and also no longer shows up in the directory listing.

Repeat this process for any sensitive files on your hard drive!

Wipe entire hard drives

If you’re disposing of an old hard drive, or giving it to someone else, then you might instead want to wipe your entire hard drive. shred can be invoked on hard drives, but on modern file systems, the shred process may be reversible. We’ll use the program wipe to securely delete all of the data on a hard drive.

Unlike shred, wipe is not included in Ubuntu by default, so we have to install it. Open up the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Administration folder and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager.

wipe is part of the Universe repository, which is not enabled by default. We’ll enable it by clicking on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic Package Manager window.

Check the checkbox next to “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close.

You’ll need to reload Synaptic’s package list. Click on the Reload button in the main Synaptic Package Manager window.

Once the package list has been reloaded, the text over the search field will change to “Rebuilding search index”.

Wait until it reads “Quick search,” and then type “wipe” into the search field. The wipe package should come up, along with some other packages that perform similar functions.

Click on the checkbox to the left of the label “wipe” and select “Mark for Installation”.

Click on the Apply button to start the installation process. Click the Apply button on the Summary window that pops up.

Once the installation is done, click the Close button and close the Synaptic Package Manager window.

Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left of the screen, then Accessories > Terminal.

You need to figure our the correct hard drive to wipe. If you wipe the wrong hard drive, that data will not be recoverable, so exercise caution!

In the terminal window, type in:

sudo fdisk -l

A list of your hard drives will show up. A few factors will help you identify the right hard drive. One is the file system, found in the System column of  the list – Windows hard drives are usually formatted as NTFS (which shows up as HPFS/NTFS). Another good identifier is the size of the hard drive, which appears after its identifier (highlighted in the following screenshot).

In our case, the hard drive we want to wipe is only around 1 GB large, and is formatted as NTFS. We make a note of the label found under the the Device column heading. If you have multiple partitions on this hard drive, then there will be more than one device in this list.

The wipe developers recommend wiping each partition separately.

To start the wiping process, type the following into the terminal:

sudo wipe <device label>

In our case, this is:

sudo wipe /dev/sda1

Again, exercise caution – this is the point of no return!

Your hard drive will be completely wiped. It may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the drive you’re wiping.

Conclusion

If you have sensitive information on your hard drive – and chances are you probably do – then it’s a good idea to securely delete sensitive files before you give away or dispose of your hard drive. The most secure way to delete your data is with a few swings of a hammer, but shred and wipe from a Ubuntu Live CD is a good alternative!

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Getting a virus is bad. Getting a virus that causes your computer to crash when you reboot is even worse. We’ll show you how to clean viruses from your computer even if you can’t boot into Windows by using a virus scanner in a Ubuntu Live CD.

There are a number of virus scanners available for Ubuntu, but we’ve found that avast! is the best choice, with great detection rates and usability.

Unfortunately, avast! does not have a proper 64-bit version, and forcing the install does not work properly. If you want to use avast! to scan for viruses, then ensure that you have a 32-bit Ubuntu Live CD.

If you currently have a 64-bit Ubuntu Live CD on a bootable flash drive, it does not take long to wipe your flash drive and go through our guide again and select normal (32-bit) Ubuntu 9.10 instead of the x64 edition. For the purposes of fixing your Windows installation, the 64-bit Live CD will not provide any benefits.

Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open up Firefox by clicking on its icon in the top panel.

Navigate to http://www.avast.com/linux-home-edition.

Click on the Download tab, and then click on the link to download the DEB package.

Save it to the default location.

While avast! is downloading, click on the link to the registration form on the download page. Fill in the registration form if you do not already have a trial license for avast!.

By the time you’ve filled out the registration form, avast! will hopefully be finished downloading.

Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications in the top-left corner of the screen, then expanding the Accessories menu and clicking on Terminal.

In the terminal window, type in the following commands, pressing enter after each line.

cd Downloads
sudo dpkg –i avast*

This will install avast! on the live Ubuntu environment.

To ensure that you can use the latest virus database, while still in the terminal window, type in the following command:

sudo sysctl –w kernel.shmmax=128000000

Now we’re ready to open avast!. Click on Applications on the top-left corner of the screen, expand the Accessories folder, and click on the new avast! Antivirus item.

You will first be greeted with a window that asks for your license key. Hopefully you’ve received it in your email by now; open the email that avast! sends you, copy the license key, and paste it in the Registration window.

avast! Antivirus will open. You’ll notice that the virus database is outdated.

Click on the Update database button and avast! will start downloading the latest virus database.

To scan your Windows hard drive, you will need to “mount” it. While the virus database is downloading, click on Places on the top-left of your screen, and click on your Windows hard drive, if you can tell which one it is by its size.

If you can’t tell which is the correct hard drive, then click on Computer and check out each hard drive until you find the right one. When you find it, make a note of the drive’s label, which appears in the menu bar of the file browser.

Also note that your hard drive will now appear on your desktop.

By now, your virus database should be updated. At the time this article was written, the most recent version was 100404-0.

In the main avast! window, click on the radio button next to Selected folders and then click on the “+” button to the right of the list box. It will open up a dialog box to browse to a location.

To find your Windows hard drive, click on the “>” next to the computer icon. In the expanded list, find the folder labelled “media” and click on the “>” next to it to expand it. In this list, you should be able to find the label that corresponds to your Windows hard drive.

If you want to scan a certain folder, then you can go further into this hierarchy and select that folder. However, we will scan the entire hard drive, so we’ll just press OK.

Click on Start scan and avast! will start scanning your hard drive.

If a virus is found, you’ll be prompted to select an action. If you know that the file is a virus, then you can Delete it, but there is the possibility of false positives, so you can also choose Move to chest to quarantine it.

When avast! is done scanning, it will summarize what it found on your hard drive. You can take different actions on those files at this time by right-clicking on them and selecting the appropriate action. When you’re done, click Close.

Your Windows PC is now free of viruses, in the eyes of avast!. Reboot your computer and with any luck it will now boot up!

Alternatives to avast!

If avast! and a liberal amount of Googling doesn’t fix your problem, it’s possible that a different virus scanner will fix your obscure issue.

Here are a list of other virus scanners available for Ubuntu that are either free or offer free trials. See their support forums for help on installing these virus scanners.

• Avira AntiVir Personal for Linux / Solaris
• Panda Antivirus for Linux
  • Installation and usage guide from Ubuntu
• F-PROT Antivirus for Linux
• ClamAV installation and usage guide from Ubuntu
• NOD32 Antivirus for Linux
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010
• Bitdefender Antivirus for Unices

Conclusion

Running avast! from a Ubuntu Live CD can clean the vast majority of viruses from your Windows PC. This is another reason to always have a Ubuntu Live CD ready just in case something happens to your Windows installation!

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