Copy to CD running Knoppix from same CD drive

[GotCoffee]

The corrupt machine I want to access has only one CD drive which is a CD-RW. The OS is Win2000. Booting from my Knoppix 3.6 CD, I cannot eject the CD to insert a blank CD. How do I put in a blank CD and copy a file from the "documents and settings" folder to the CD? I am new to Linux so break it down Barney style to me.
Thanks,
Ray

[Harry Kuhman]

..... Booting from my Knoppix 3.6 CD, I cannot eject the CD to insert a blank CD. How do I put in a blank CD and copy a file from the "documents and settings" folder to the CD? ....

Keeping it simple,............. you don't.

Consider a few alternatives: Writing the files to floppy, writing the files to a USB storage device, transfering them to another computer on the network, even e-mailing them to your 1 gig gmail mail box and fetching them back from another system.

You just might get away with using a smaller Live CD distro like DSL (not sure if DSL has a CD Writer, but there are a number of Live Linux distros under 200 meg, I suspect at least one does), writing it to the first session of a CD but keeping the CD open for more sessions, and then writing the files to a second session. Then again, I really expect that the gods would find some way to punish you if you tried to do this, but it just might work (the proof is left to the student).

[GotCoffee]

First, thanks for helping,
The files I have to copy are close to 400meg and my 16meg USB key will be way too small. The problem with e-mailing is that the computer is a company computer and we have a static IP for each machine and the "computer guru's, term used very lightly) first thought is to reimage the hd. (I work for the Gov't). Before I turn the computer in for maintenance, I would like to recover the files that will be "lost". The machine will not even boot in safe mode.

[Harry Kuhman]

For something 400 megs in size (big document!) I would consider an FTP transfer to another system. If you do manage to write to a second session on a CD with a smaller distro please let us know, it would be a handy trick to have, but even though it sounds like it just might work I sure wouldn't bet money on it. I don't have a flash drive that big either, but they do make them (as well as compact flash memory cards and related devices) and you might be able to borrow one (or a USB hard drive) long enough to pull this off. Friends with digital cameras might be a good place to start.

[Harry Kuhman]

Guess what, it works!

You're likely way ahread of me, since you have a vested interest in making this work and I'm only a dumb shit noob who wanted to find out how I would get screwed, but I tried it and it worked. Here's the details:

I used a copy of DSL that was written to a CDRW (CDR would certainly work) as the first session and the CD was left open for additional sessions. I used DSL because it's small, less than 50 megs in size, so it leaves a lot of space for data. Sure enough, DSL has a CD writing application right in the menu. I fired it up and poked around (could have read the instructions, but what fun would there be in that?). I found quickly that you put the files you want in /tmp/burn, or you can change this to point to any directoiry that you are interested in. I decided to just use the default. No desktop icons for the hard drive partitions, so I had to fire up a shell and do a mount command. OK, I'm a Linux novice but that was no problem. I saw Midnight Commander on the disk and decided to learn about it, used it to copy the file to /tmp/burn (although the shell command should have been easy enough). I just used a 30 meg file that was handy, but it's clear that 400 megs would have worked as well.

Looking back at the burning software, I wondered which steps I needed to do next. I saw an option for a multi-session disc. Yup, that's what I was going to make, so I took that. I expected to make a few more choices, but it took off right away, looked over the first session, and wrote the new session to the CD.

Just to be sure, I shut down everything and booted the notebook back into windows. I inserted the CD and explored the disc. Sue enough, the file I wanted to "rescue" was written there along with the DSL files. It's a music video that is playing now from the CD as I write this.

DSL can be had here:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

[firebyrd10]

You can email the files if you want.

yousendit.com allows for up to 1 gig file transfer for free, without an account. The files will be deleted in 7 days however. (Plenty of time)

[mzilikazi]

The corrupt machine I want to access has only one CD drive which is a CD-RW. The OS is Win2000. Booting from my Knoppix 3.6 CD, I cannot eject the CD to insert a blank CD. How do I put in a blank CD and copy a file from the "documents and settings" folder to the CD? I am new to Linux so break it down Barney style to me.
Thanks,
Ray

If you have 1G of system RAM you can also use the toram cheatcode which will alow you to eject the disc and in turn free up your cdrom drive.

[GotCoffee]

Thanks again. I like the idea you usendit.com
I think I'll try the DSL except I can't get the website to pull up. Is there somewere else to download DSL?
The machine is a Got't so only has 128 Meg and the files are mainly powerpoint and PDF files, not one large 400meg.

edit:
I found the ISO at SuprNova.org

[Markus]

Thanks again. I like the idea you usendit.com
I think I'll try the DSL except I can't get the website to pull up. Is there somewere else to download DSL?
The machine is a Got't so only has 128 Meg and the files are mainly powerpoint and PDF files, not one large 400meg. Yep, website's down. Try: http://iso.linuxquestions.org/distro.php?distro=4

EDIT: Just noticed they're offering 0.8.3. If you want the current one try ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/

[Harry Kuhman]

Thanks again. I like the idea you usendit.com
I think I'll try the DSL except I can't get the website to pull up. Is there somewere else to download DSL?
The machine is a Got't so only has 128 Meg and the files are mainly powerpoint and PDF files, not one large 400meg.
yousendit.com looks interesting, and is something I didn't know about.

Might be needed as well, since there is a size limit on e-mail files (would certainly block the larger files).

Yea, the DSL website is down for me too at the moment, although it was up last night when I made the last post. I expect it may come back soon. If you want I could send you the 50 meg ISO by yousendit.com (since it's too large for regular email). Just send me an email address for you by private message (don't post your email unless you want the spammers to harvest it).

You could try a google search on "damn small Linux", gets a lot of hits, I haven't checked them all to see who else might offer a copy.

[GotCoffee]

I've downloaded the ISO, version DSL-0.8.4

[Harry Kuhman]

I've downloaded the ISO, version DSL-0.8.4
Great. That's newer that the one I got just a few days ago from the DSL site (I have 8.3). I expect the site was down as they made changes for the new version, or maybe just swampped by people trying for the latest and greatest. Good Luck.

[Harry Kuhman]

One more thing I should add to the "write to the second session on a live CD where you booted from the first session" trick: I found that the DSL linux CD I had made would no longer boot after writing the second session. This isn't really much of a problem, since the real purpose of this exercise was to get recovered files written to a CDR or CDRW and you still have that. The disk can be read as any normal CD. But writing the second session seems to change it enough that it's no longer bootable.

Those trying this might want to use a CDRW, if available, so they can reuse the disc, but if your main purpose is to extract and archive files a CDR should be fine.

[styven]

Hi there,

not sure if your question was answered but this is my experience in recovering all my photos from hdd after trying to install a version of linux and messing things up to the point that xp would not boot at all.

To my relifef i could "see" all the files from that drive via the live knopiix cd, great!!!!

If this is a bit "sucking eggs" then i am sorry.

The simple answer is to put another cdrw drive in, this is all i did, I am assuming that the pc can take another drive. For what they cost it is worth buying it to save time and make the task simple, I happened to have one kicking about in the wardrobe.

[firebyrd10]

As for the DSL thing, You can use the toram cheatcode and just put it there. That way you have some free space.

78 megs of ram is still enough to run the GUI.