[tlug] Forgetting HDD or Partition Names

[CL <az.4tlug@example.com>]

Once again, I am finding ways to make my days off far too interesting.

I decided that I would try to start 2011 with as few old IDE drives 
stacked in the corner as possible as well as finally erasing and 
shredding all of my old 3.5" floppies.  I started out to copy all of my 
old work files on to one SATA HDD where I intended to sort them out and 
archive on DVD.  I have research, archive, and report information that 
has been passed forward from my first 8086 box and the 8" floppies from 
the first Wang word processor I used at my then place of work, all the 
way to the present.  It has all be transferred to media that is 
currently readable ... in theory ... along the way.  Most of the old 
stuff is DOS / WIN of one sort or another.

I have an XP guest running on an Xubuntu host.  All of the stuff on 
floppies copied straight over in time to make the last moeru-gomi run of 
the year.  I am able to read and sort those particular files and old 
programs.

I began mounting IDE drives two at a time into the chassis for copying 
and have discovered a few problems that mostly appear to be permissions, 
but a few that I can't attribute to that:

1.  I can read partition names and, after assigning them network 
locations in XP, I can open, read, and save files individually in a 
partition in the virtual disk.  I cannot copy directories or partitions 
as complete blocks, though ... which I think is Permissions Problem 
Number One.

In Xubuntu, I have NTFS set to read / write and can mount / unmount by 
partition ID or partition name (e.g. /media/sda1 or /media/ROOT).  All 
are set to Administrator mountable only.  Should I be setting mount 
permission to "Everyone"?  I cannot think of anything else I am 
forgetting, but probably am ... if anyone would like to suggest another 
place to look.

2.  When I remove the IDE disk and replace it with another, Xubuntu 
tells me that the disk / partitions of the disk I removed cannot be 
found and asks me to (S)kip or (M)anually mount them.  I skip and, when 
I attempt to find and mount the new disk / partitions, the partitions of 
the new disk (particularly the root partition) have the name and 
identifier of the previous (removed) HDD, although the size of the 
current disk / partition is accurately reported.

How do I remove the details of the previous HDD from memory? I looked at 
the instructions and man pages for "fuse" and "fuser" and find them 
either unintelligible or they leave me with a fear that I will 
permanently destroy valuable hardware or lose data.

3.  ... and what additional thing(s) would I have to do to be able to 
copy the contents of entire partitions on to another disk for sorting?

TIA for any guidance.

--
CL