removeable HD with XP & a Ubuntu machine

Could you be a little more specific?
Am I correct in thinking that you have a machine running Ubuntu and you want to copy data from a removable hard-disk formatted under XP from which you want to copy data?
By what method is the disk removable - is it a usb disk or does it fit in a carrier in the machine?
Please describe carefully your situation - better to give too much detail than too little.

You only need to edit the menu.lst if you want to boot up into Xp, assuming you have XP fully installed on your external hard-drive.

Moving files across is much easier. Usually when you have another drive attached or when you have a cd in the cd drive or anything like that then you'll be able to find it in the "Places" menu. It usually has a name like "20Gb media" or something really helpful like that lol. I usually have to click into a few of these before i find the right place.

Hope this helps :)
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Thanks guys. The HD will live in a removable drawer.

Can you tell me what and where to edit the menu.lst

Blimey, i can't believe no-one else has answered this yet! It's usually a favourite! We really need to know how many physical hard-drives your machine has in order to give an answer that will work straight off but Windows does it's best to confuse the issue.

When you're in Ubuntu go up to the top taskbar and click on

Applications - Accessories - Terminal

into the terminal/command window/console type

cd /boot/grub
ls
sudo cp menu.lst menu.lst.050409

it will now ask for your normal user password, not your Superuser/Root one and no staras appear while you type so that no-one can even find out the length of you password easily, just to keep it even more secure as these passwords often tend to be quite short and easy to type. Note the "ls" command is a lower-case "LS" and lists what's already in the folder. "dir" also works so familiarity with msdos pays off a little sometimes - ls gives nicer output tho ;) "cp" copies the file and it's important to make a backup that we can get back to if things go a bit wrong somehow - really we are just copying the menu.lst to a new file we are calling menu.lst.050409 - handy to have a date stamp ;) Anyway, continuing typing on the command-line in the terminal console

ls
sudo gedit menu.lst

it doesn't ask for your pasword because the first time you enter the password gives you a 15min window to enter further sudo commands. Gedit is a simple text-editor but there are many others such as nano which different people prefer.

In menu.lst (and many other system files) most of the first section is just written notes for humans to understand. The machines ignores lines that start with a # which we say are 'commented out'. Find the section that looks a bit like this

# examples
#
# title Windows 95/98/NT/2000
# root (hd0,0)
# makeactive
# chainloader +1
#

and delete the # from the start of all the lines except the "# examples". Sadly launchpad messes up the spacings :( Note that you can change the title to something more sensibly relevant to your own particular set-up as this is only the text that appears in the boot-menu when you bootup. I'd go for "External Windows" or something. Also you'll need to change the numbers in the "root hd(0,0)" but we need to know how many physical drives you have in order to give the right numbers. Note that grub counts from 0, just as a good machine should. I would guess that your external drive would be the first partition on your second drive so change that line to

root hd(1,0)

if it doesn't work then boot back into Ubuntu and edit it to

root hd(2,0)

or something.
Hope this helps!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

PS Some notes on the root user and the sudo command
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo