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I had a Win 7 computer that gave a blue screen. I got a replacement.

I used Ubuntu Live cd on the one that crashed to salvage my data. Among many things I have a 6GB MS Outlook 2010 .pst Inbox archive.

I really want to get it back. How do I do it? Since it is > than 4GB in size I cannot copy it to FAT file systems.

Questions:

  1. How do I copy it to my new Win 7 laptop? I am hoping it use it with Outlook 2010 on my new computer.
  2. If I cannot use it on my new laptop, can I atleast use it on Ubuntu? How?
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2 Answers

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To begin with, I would try to fix the bluescreen error. That being said, if you really can't for one reason or another, I would do one of the following:

From Ubuntu, try using a zip program or similar to "split" the file in to multiple sections, and then reassemble on the new machine - many zip programs allow you to configure how big you want the chunks. I can not be more specific as I do not know linux programs that can do this...

(I think 7-zip is only Windows, but I just read a link about a Linux port in the Ubuntu repository. You can try that, or possibly running in Wine - otherwise, try to find a linux program that does the same).

I think splitting is the best solution in your case. Other than this, Samba can be a bit of a pain to get working, so, I would recommend trying to install Filezilla server on your laptop, then downloading filezilla to the Ubuntu live and simply copying it that way (If you need any detailed instructions/guides, let me know).

Finally, the quickest solution, but possibly not recommended is if your old machine was a desktop, you can take out your laptops hard drive and copy it directly to there and then put it back in (as long as you are not using Bitlocker/similar).

Or... on the last solution, if you have a USB caddy of some sort, you can take out your old hard drive and connect it directly to your new machine.

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I ran into another problem. I tried to install Ubuntu 10.04 on the hard disk drive (/dev/sda2). This partition had my data too. I killed the updates after the install and then the computer wouldn't boot. Now when I try to use the live CD and mount the parttion, it won't mount. I remember during install the OS files were being kept at /dev/sda2. Should I still hope that I would be able to salvage my data? – abc Sep 23 '11 at 0:52
without knowing how far you got, or exactly what you did, I can't easily help you. If you performed a format and install, it is unlikely you will be able to recover many larger files, but there is a chance you can recover a few smaller files using recovery tools (can't list any for Linux, but, there are a number of questions here that can help you). If you installed on the same drive without formatting, it is possible you can do a windows startup repair to rebuild the loader. But, without knowing exactly what happened, I can't really help you much further. Sorry. – William Hilsum Sep 23 '11 at 1:03
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Since it is > than 4GB in size I cannot copy it to FAT file systems.

NTFS works okay on pendrives (although slightly slow).

Alternatively you can split it to several pieces; for example:

rar -v4294967290b a mail.rar mail.pst

Later simply extract the file with WinRAR or unrar.

On Ubuntu, the Evolution mail client should be able to import data from PST files, but not use them directly.

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