Copying & pasting files

[Morberis]

Hi I'm having a bit of a problem.

My OS is Vista, I'm using a Knoppix live cd for recovery purposes.

After a reg edit to my tcpip.sys file my computer no longer boots, and disabling device signing just results in a blue screen. I did make a backup of the file before I changed it but now when I load up Knoppix and try to move the original file back into place it says that it cannot do that. I can not delete or rename the file either. I have full read write priviliges as far as I can see but I'm still unable.

the system pathh is C:\Windows\System32\drivers

Is there a way I can gain control of the file delete it, and place the original back in place?

My HDD is a motherboard raid 0 using NTFS.

I'm sorry for asking this, while I know lots about windows and how to do almost anything I want there I have absolutely no experience using Linux.

[Harry Kuhman]

Sorry, but I have some bad news for you.

First of all, most consumer oriented RAID systems are software based and Windows ones use special Windows based drivers to access the RAID array. So unless the vendor has a 100% compatible Linux driver that can read and write the RAID array in the same sector configuration, you will not be able to access that disk array with Linux.

Linux does have it's own RAID support, but there is no reason to expect it's disk organization to be compatible with a Windows solution.

You might think that you can see files under Knoppix out on your raid drive, as parts of the partition table will still be on disk 0. But if you examine large files you will likely find that they do not contain what you think that they do. Linux is trying to understand what's in the partition table as if the disk was not a raid array.

Even if the drive was not in a RAID configuration, most of us believe that it is not safe to write to a NTFS partition with Knoppix. Reading is fine. Writing is high risk. Some people report success. Some say that they can do it after a tricky change in the low level disk driver that most new users will never do. I don't trust it and discourage it. If one needs to recover data from a Windows disk the safe way to do it is to transfer the files to a FAT drive, write them to CD/DVD, or transfer them to another computer across a network. But if you have a raid array I know of no way that you could do that.

In general, raid is a bad idea for the average user. RAID zero has no redundancy and increases the chance of total data loss because either drive failing will cost you all of your data. And data recovery is far more complex. The performance improvement is nice, but may not be all that great depending on how well the software drivers work. And, of course, it leads to the current problem. RAID 1 wastes a lot of disk space, may incur some speed penalty, and is used as an excuse by some users to not make safe backups. Unfortunately, RAID 1 does not eliminate the need for backups, many things can destroy the data on a RAID 1 system (or RAID 5 or other RAID systems with redundant data) including a virus, operating system error, operator error, power supply or even fan failure. RAID 1 only protects you from a hardware failure of one drive, which certainly does happen, but backups are still needed.

[Morberis]

Hm looks like I'm out of luck then.

For the record my motherboard is the p5n-e sli from asus and it doesn't seem like there are any compatible drivers for linux.

Edit: After looking at all my large files the file size seems to be correct, all with 5 mb at least and nothing seems to be missing. I'm going to try to copy and paste them on my fat32 thumbdrive and see if I can get anything worth saving off.

I do backup once every week but I'm still losing about 30 gigs in movies, work related material (important but not worth the cost of a professional) and most importantly the meta data folder for my windows media player library, without it I need to manually update it all 5000 tracks for the 5h time (dear god, and no not 1 program I've tried using has ever been able to pull the album/artist/track, wmp 11) and my firefox bookmarks.

Dam dam dam.

But thanks for the help, its better I know now than waiting and trying for days to get it to work.

[ckamin]

Why not try one of the Windows Live discs? Bart PE is probably one of the more common ones, unless you have access to a genuine Windows PE disk. You can load your Raid drivers if required and copy your files to an external drive or other device. There should be no problem writing to NTFS partitions either, since it is a native file system for the discs.