Using knoppix to retrieve "lost" files..

[paul23]

Hi,

My laptop completely crashed (apparantly some vital parts of windows got corrupted, and even when reinstalling it crashes cause it couldn't copy the files anymore.. (something like /boot/bsd or names like that warnings WINDOWS gave when starting/blue-screening). - any chkdisk run gave 1000s of orphaned indices and unexpected end of files..
Problem is I would really, really like to retrieve some installation files (can only download those at the university themself, and they are 25gb big - and my personal documents -around 2-3gb)


Now a friend mentioned using a knoppix-cd-boot.. - So I just burned knoppix, and indeed it works :D.

I tried working my way around a bit already (looked at all menus), and I could indeed browse the files I would like to retrieve using the text-based file manager. Also I just opened a "windows"-like program (isn't that called a window manager or something?).
Now how do I copy files (and folders) exactly? - I tried ctrl-c+ctrl-v at the desired locations.. However upon copying it closes the 2 windows???

Also -as knoppix sparkled my interest-Can anybody explain the actual difference between knoppix (os), adriane, konqueror & gnome (latter 2 are 2 variations to do the "same" thing if I'm correct?)

[Harry Kuhman]

...Also -as knoppix sparkled my interest-Can anybody explain the actual difference between knoppix (os), adriane, konqueror & gnome (latter 2 are 2 variations to do the "same" thing if I'm correct?)
Knoppix is a Live Linux CD, it includes the Linux OS as well as many applications.

Adriane is another project from Klause, the primary author of Knoppix. It brings speach to a Live CD for the visually impaired.

konquror is a browser (like Firefox, Opera, and even IE). It generally is used as part of KDE, one of several GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) that are available for Linux users. (and to add to the confusion, the GUI runs on top of X).

gnome is another GUI for Linux. It is considered less resource intensive than KDE. Gnome was included as an option in some early releases of Knoppix but, as far as I know, has been removed from current releases (or at least from CD releases).

[paul23]

Thanks for the fast answers, - But what about the copying? - Could it be because the file (1 file) is 20GB big, wasn't there a limitationlike 4GB for FAT32 HDs? - I'm just wondering, since copying my documents worked smoothly :).

[Harry Kuhman]

Thanks for the fast answers, - But what about the copying? ..
I answered what I felt comfortable answering. It is not my problem that you asked several unrelated questions in the same post.

I don't feel comfortable giving you advice on command line commands, read the man pages for that. I also don't know what you think you are copying these files too. And I strongly advise against writing to a NTFS partition with Knoppix, assuming that you don't want that partition corrupted also. To address your other new question, files 4 gog or over can not be written to any type of FAT partition.

The way that I use Knoppix to recover files when Windows refuses to boot is to transfer them to another computer across a network. I generally do this by FTP. I install a FTP server on a different computer (usually a Windows computer, there are many free FTP servers that you can find by a Google search), and then from Knoppix I use an FTP client to transfer the files. In the past I used konquror as the FTP client, but konquror is said to be omitted from Knoppix 6.2. I would imagine that one could still use any of the other browsers, or even the command line FTP client for this task.