Recovery of bad hard drive

[dagatorman]

I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 with the PBR error that's been crashing computers worldwide.
Of course all Dell can do is replace the hard drive and restore from CD.. well there are files on the CD that are very important so I didn't want to do that. So in my search for solution, everyone pointed to Knoppix.

I did get the Knoppix up and running. and I can see all the files that I need.
I also have a 1 GB USB Drive, that shows up as SDA1
So I thought I was safely home.. but when I try to COPY TO a file or a folder to SDA1, I keep getting erro that it could not be written to SDA1.

The USB drive is formatted as FAT drive.
So I checked the permissions on the foldr and it's all set up READ only. Even the Owner is read only.

Is the copy problem due to the permission? If so how can I change the permission on the HDD?
or should the USB drive be formatted in a different way?

Please help!!! Thanks.

[Harry Kuhman]

Read answers 6 and 5 here.