I'm a novice Knoppix user and I'm trying to recover files off a Windows XP hard drive where the OS has failed. I had been successful in recovering files before, but it has taken me a while to try several ways to get it right and it has been a while since I've done this.

I'm trying to recover a user's personal folder from the hard drive to an external USB hard drive. I boot up to Knoppix and I can see three hard drives. One is the partitioned recovery HD and then the HD with the files I'm trying to recover. The other HD is the external USB drive.

I have gone into the properties of each drive and given them read/write permissions. If I try to change the permissions on the folders I'm trying to copy from and to I get the error "Could not change permissions for /mnt/uba1/recover". If I copy the folder I'm trying to move, in this case iTunes, to the external USB I get errors like "could not make folder mnt/uba1/itunes".

The files I'm looking to recover are on hda2 and I'm trying to move to a folder I created on the USB drive UBA1. From the hda2 drive I'm trying to recover this directory: /Documents and Settings/Owner/My Documents/My Music/iTunes. I'm trying to move them to the UBA1 to a folder named "recover".

Am I missing permission settings, is there a command that I can run that makes this easier?