My HD died, need some help.

[sak1134]

I am running windows xp, and recently suffered a hard drive "crash". It appears that the registry files have become corrupt, and windows can no longer read the drive. A friend was familiar with knoppix and after booting my machine from a disk, i can see the hard drive and all of my files still exist thankfully.

I have purchased a new HD and want to transfer all of my important data from the old drive to the new one. Probably less than 10 gigs worth of stuff I don't want to lose. I tried the copy/paste method which did not work (from surfing the forums this morning I think I now know why - knoppix wont write to NTFS). I just want to make sure I have figured out the correct way to transfer my files.

Here is what I beleive I need to do, am just asking for confirmation or correction if I am wrong.

I have a CD and a DVD burner.

With the Knoppix disk in one of those drives, I simply need to burn my data to the other drive and then I should be able to transfer it from the CD back to the new HD. Is this correct? Is there anything else I need to do/know.

Thanks for the assitance.

[mAU]

Hello,
I'm dealing with a similar problem (although my lost partitions are FAT32) and I was able to rescue the data with a great tool
"ddrescue" (by A.Diaz) you can copy all data to a new disk without acessing the messed partitions.
Then attempt to recover the imaged bad partition on the new disk with the "testdisk" app (by C.Grenier).
If you can't heal the bad partition you can try to simply recover the data with the "photorec" app (by C.Grenier)
they are all opensource and free under gpl. hope it helps, good luck

mAU

ddrescue link: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html - I make this running from Knoppix live-CD
testdisk and photorec link: http://www.cgsecurity.org/ - run from bootable floppy with freedos or dos6.22