windows - How to preserve diacritics when cross-mounting drives to Windows7 and Linux

A friend backed up an in accessible Windows 7 partition to a big (close to 1TB) external USB drive using KNOPIX. Unfortunately the umlauts and accents in the file names of his extensive music collection now appear garbled (UTF8 vs ISO xxx, I guess) when he accesses that drive from Windows.

My guess is he needs to mount the two drives in a 'special way,' that takes the diacritics translation into account, on KNOPIX? Or do you have another idea what went wrong?

This is the second part of a windows/linux problem I'm having. See how-does-one-mount-a-partition-in-windows-7 for the other part

Answer

Make sure your system (Knoppix) is using an Unicode-based locale (UTF-8):

$ locale
LANG=en_US.utf-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf-8"
[skipped irrelevant settings]
LC_ALL=

If the LANG or LC_CTYPE variables do not end in .utf-8 (or .utf8), fix them:

1. 
   

   run locale -a and make sure it lists the needed locale (i.e. en_US.utf-8);

   
   


2. 
   

   if the locale is not listed, uncomment it in /etc/locale.gen:

   
   

   en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
   

   
   

   and run locale-gen as root;

   
   


3. 
   

   run export LANG="en_US.utf-8"

   
   


4. 
   

   run (xterm &) or (gnome-terminal &) to start a new terminal with the new settings applied;

   
   


5. 
   

   close the old terminal. (It is not enough to change $LANG for the current shell.)

   
   

In the new terminal, verify output of locale and check whether it fixes your problem.

Also make sure your filesystem driver is using UTF-8. The NTFS filesystem uses Unicode exclusively, but if you mounted it while having an incorrect locale, the driver might be in a translation mode. Unmount the filesystem and mount it again, while having a correct $LANG. If even that does not help, try adding the utf8 and iocharset=utf8 options to mount...

# mount -t ntfs -o utf8,iocharset=utf8 /dev/foo /mnt

...or switch to the ntfs-3g driver:

# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/foo /mnt