[SLUG] Recovering NTFS files with live CDs

[Al Girling]

Hi folks,

We're having a bit of a problem here at the moment.  Ali's XP machine is
completely FUBAR.  There are files on the HD which we would very much
like to save though.

All her, not inconsiderable, attempts to recover the system to enable
her to boot the machine have failed. :(  I suggested we try a live CD to
see if that would help.  The only live CD I have which works is the
FreeBSD one Carl gave me.  So in that went boot up ended up at an XFCE
desktop.  O.K.  Apart from much of the text is in Italian! :0
Presumably because it was all going to smoothly!  We get both HDs
mounted and can see everything, but can do nothing with it.  Every
attempt to write to a floppy gets an error message of 'System is read
only'.

Now I'm not sure if this is because of the disk being a demo disk and
this is simply beyond the limitations of the disk.  Or because writing
to NTFS file system is still experimental and not supported.

Can anyone suggest a way we can save these files?  At the moment some
sort of live CD is looking our best option as it's the only way we've
been able to see the files.  Is this sort of recovery possible with
Knoppix or another newer live CD?

The machine has a CD-WR and a DVD drive we can boot from so it might be
possible to write to a CD while running the live CD from the DVD drive.

Any suggestions?

Al

-- 
Al Girling
Linux User: #290080            <http://counter.li.org>
Scarborough Linux User Group   <http://www.scarborough.lug.org.uk>