Copying from an internal hard drive to a USB thumb drive

[bagmonkey]

I am trying to back up a friends data off of her laptop, as her son has corrupted the install of XP on the computer to the point that I can't fix it without formatting.

I have read through the forums and tried everything mentioned. I've enabled both the hard drive and the thumb drive to be writable, however I still get the error"You cannot drop any items into a directory in which you do not have write permissions". I have checked the write permissions and everything is how it should be. Could someone help me out here? Thank you.

[Harry Kuhman]

.... I've enabled both the hard drive and the thumb drive to be writable, however I still get the error"You cannot drop any items into a directory in which you do not have write permissions".
I do not know what your problem is, and you may have to post more detailed information before anyone can help you. What you say just doesn't match up with my experience with Knoppix.

First of all, before I forget, I would strongly suggest that you never make a NTFS hard drive partition writable for Knoppix, and certainly never do this with one that you already believe to be corrupt. Knoppix is not going to make it better, things could only get worse. For any future testing, keep the hard drive partition read-only.

Next, once you make it writeable you should certainly be able to copy files to the USB drive (copy them, don't move them, to avoid needing to write to the hard drive). I was so surprised to see you report that this didn't work for you that I just fired up Knoppix 5.3.1, stuck in a USB thumb drive and copied some files myself. It worked fine, actually was easier than it should have been! That is, I right clicked on the thumb drive icon and went to make it writeable, but Knoppix asked me if I was sure that I wanted to make it read-only! I didn't so I said "no", and I was able to move and copy files to the flash drive just fine. I'm rather disturbed by this change in 5.3.1 form any version that I have used before, in the opast the Knoppix aproach has been to mount read-only by default, knowing that many knoppix users are new to Linux, and only mount drives and partitions as writeable when explicitly instructed to by the user. This may be a change in philosphy on the part of Klaus, but it seems like a bug. But it doesn't sound like it is your problem.

You do know that some flash drives have a very tiny physical write-enable switch on them, don't you? Are you sure that your drive can be written to? I don't really expect this is your problem, but I'm hard pressed to suggest anything else with the information that you have posted.

If that didn't help, then I would suggest that you try again, and make very detailed notes about what you are seeing and what you are doing. tell us all of the properties of the flash drive as seen by knoppix. Don't just say that you made the drive writeable, tell us exactly what you did to be able to write to it and what the system responses were. Tell us it's name, it's exact size, everything that you can. I don't think that there can be too much information here, the problem is if you gloss over something and we just assume that what you are seeing or doing is what we expect to see or do. Something is going wrong and we are not going to be able to guide you without knowing exactly what you are doing. Of course, as I said, do not make the hard disk writeable. Post back a long detailed explicit report of what you are doing and I and perhaps others will try to duplicate it and see if we can catch your error.

Alternately, you might want to recover files they way that I do, which doesn't need a flash drive at all. If you have a network, install a FTP server on another Windows system (of course, you could use a Linux system, but I assume that you are more comfortable with Windows). There are many free FTP servers available, Google will help you find one. Then use Konguror (that window that opens up when you first boot Knoppix) as an FTP client and transfer the files that you want across the network by FTP. This is a fast way to transfer a lot of files. You can then rebuild the bad disk and use Windows to transfer the files back to the new system.