Connect 2 laptops with RJ45 cable (Ubuntu 10.10 laptop with Windows 7 laptop)

Hi to all,

I have the problem that a laptops with windows XP cannot startup even in safe mode nor using last good known configuration. I have a Ubuntu 10.10 Live CD and booting from it I can read the Hard Drive.

I need to do a backup the Hard Drive from XP laptop and I want to connect this laptop (Windows XP) with another one that has installed Windows 7 using a RJ45 cable(crossover) or wirelessly, both are within the same home LAN.

I found a procedure to do it between 2 windows computers, setting up static IPs in both computers

Laptop_1: IP=192.168.1.215, SNmask=255.255.255.0, default-gateway=192.168.1.7
Laptop_2: IP=192.168.1.216, SNmask=255.255.255.0, default-gateway=192.168.1.7 

but I dont know how to connect with success Ubuntu(LiveCD)-Windows 7 laptops, specially how to do the right configuration within Ubuntu 10.10.

May somebody help me out with this issue, if you have a step by step procedure must be great for me to learn it.

Many thanks in advance for any help.

Regards.

From a root prompt, assuming your computer's network adapter is eth0(might be eth1 if there's more than one):

ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.215 netmask 255.255.255.0
route add default gw 192.168.1.7

...though I'm confused what the default gateway's supposed to do when two computers are joined with a loopback and nowhere else to anything else. You can probably omit it.

If Ubuntu finds a DHCP server it'll wipe out those settings when it autoconfigures, but it shouldn't when it sees nothing but a loopback cable.

procedure to do what? What do you want to do with these computers once they're talking over IP?

Hi Corona688,

Thanks for your answer, it works set up static IP to eth0 in that easy way.

I had to install Samba file sharing in ubuntu, send as root user the command
sudo smbpasswd -a user

to enable file sharing between ubuntu and Windows laptop. I did connecting
both laptops with a straight cable (I was thinking it was posibly only with crossover cable). The transfer rate is lower than 3Mb/s, but at least is better than using a USB pendrive.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Best regards.

Technically, recent ethernet interfaces should autodetect whether the transmit/receive pairs are reversed. I've found that they do so badly, though, especially with cheap cards; often negotiating down to lower speeds than they would if the cable was properly crossed.

There may be other reasons for the slow transfer speed, of course. I do hope you mean 3 megabytes at least, not 3 megabits!

I'd use a crossover cable in this case. As the speed you are getting is not ideal, try and and hard set the NIC card speed/duplex on both sides of the cable to see if that works better.

speed=100; duplex=full; ... for example
OR
speed-auto; duplex=auto ... just use whatever works best

typed into where? If his card supports it at all, I'd suggest using mii-tool to force duplexes instead of some nonstandard config file...