How do I run a Windows app after booting-up with Knopix?

[pvsurfer]

If I'm ever unable to bootup my WinXP C-Drive (because of a corrupted mbr or partition table), can I use KNOPPIX to bootup my drive and run my Windows image recovery app to restore my C-Drive (using an image I have on another HD)? If so, I'd appreciated a 'how-to' lesson (keeping in mind that I'm a KNOPPIX noob).

Thanks, pv

[Harry Kuhman]

This has been discussed many many times in this and several other forums. You might want to read through the forums or search (a good key word might be "recover"), as I certainly am not going to duplicate all of the information everyone has already posted.

In brief, the answer is maybe. There have been many cases of people booting Knoppix and recovering files when XP will not boot. Buit it should be obvious that if your windows partitions have taken enough damage then you might not be able to get the data that you want from them. Assuming that Knoppix can boot and see the files and it's only Windows itself that can not, then how to recover depends on where you can put the needed files, the size of the files, and what resources you have available. Some people save files to USB flash drives or other external USB devices. A very popular way to save recovered files is across a network to another computer running either Windows or Linux. Some people with a high speed connection have saved files to other locations on the Internet. Some people with a FAT patrtition (not NTFS) have saved files there and some have even installed a second hard drive just for the file recovery. What you do will depend on your particular resources, but it is good that you are thinking about this now rather than later when there is a need and you are more likely to be in panic mode.

[pvsurfer]

Thanks Harry. Actually, I had such a need a week ago. I had been lulled into a false sense of security using Norton GoBack (as a replacement for System Restore). GoBack is a great fall-back for restoring hard drives when it works - this time it didn't! After a trojan messed me up, I thought I'll just use GoBack to restore my drive to sometime before I got infected, but when I ran it, my heart must have stopped for a few seconds when GoBack reported "no safe points"! I was so pixxed-off, I decided to uninstall GoBack - which wound up messing up my boot sector. When I rebooted (a requirement to complete the removal of GoBack) the system would not bootup, not even into safe mode!

I had an image of my C-Drive on an external hard drive, but I couldn't get to the program to restore it. To make this story shorter, after several hours I was able to repair Windows, run my imaging app and restore my recent image - then all was well... that's whwn I started thinking about another means to recover a corrupted hard drive....

[OErjan]

knoppix and an external drive should work for that.