[SLUG] Recovering NTFS files with live CDs

[Jamie Adams]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:29:19 +0100, Al Girling <al21 at firenet.uk.com> wrote:
> 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'.

I'm not too sure why this would happen. Surely the disk is only fat32?
 
> 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?

The only suggestion I can think of is to network your two machines
together. Hopefully your livecd has an ssh server available, then you
can scp your files over from your machine. I have a suse livecd here
and that definately has an ssh server.

Jamie