Having Trouble...

howdy knoppix forum, first post! Im by no means a linux expert but i can navigate around... the machine im playing with is so heavily infected with skyware and virii that windows wont load... i have no choice but to format the machine but i have to back up the user directory first... in the property discription it lists the folder as 70gb so i attach my portable hdd with pleanty of space... i copy and paste the directory into my portable drive, and hour later it is due to finish and when it gets to one hundred percent its says its finished but it keeps on scrolling through the file names... the only choice is to cancel... an interesting thing is that when i look at the incomplete directory it is over 100gb but only half the directorys have shown up... what am i doin wrong here?

Thanks guys...

It is a bad idea to save the whole user directory of an corrupted Windows! How will you distinguish which file is infected and which not?

If you are using a Windows version later than XP be aware, that Windows uses many symbolic links to other directories. Try to serve manually only the most important (and perhaps not infected) files.

I havnt had problems in the past saving an entire user directory... i will usually just rip the directory to a portable hdd and run it through a clean machine with decent antivirus and anti spyware to pick up anything nasty before copying any files back to the pc... atm im looking for home movies, picures and music and whatever documents i can salvage most of which shouldnt be corrupted... ive done this many times before but it seems this combination of knoppix and the pc im workin on just produces weird results... i could try to copy directory by directory and see if that yields better results...