[SLUG] Re: Scarborough Digest, Vol 54, Issue 4

[David Webster]

scarborough-request at mailman.lug.org.uk wrote:

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>Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Recovering NTFS files with live CDs (Al Girling)
>   2. Re: Recovering NTFS files with live CDs (Jamie Adams)
>   3. Re: Recovering NTFS files with live CDs (Jamie Adams)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:29:19 +0100
>From: Al Girling <al21 at firenet.uk.com>
>Subject: [SLUG] Recovering NTFS files with live CDs
>To: "Scarb. LUG" <scarborough at mailman.lug.org.uk>
>Message-ID: <20041023222919.GC487 at percival>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>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
>
>  
>
Knoppix is a good bootable CD distro.  It comes with the 2.6 kernel, so 
you can r/w NTFS.  It should also have CD-R supported applications, so 
you can burn recovered files to CD.
Comes with KDE 3.2(/3?) so is nice and friendly to use.
http://www.knoppix.net/
http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/knoppix/
Have fun.

Dave