Basic help recovering files off bad hard drive

[krishna.murphy]

PCManFM-menu/ Tools/ Open current folder as root

Why is it imperative to "take root"? That seems an odd way for things to be set up.

Cheers!
Krishna

[Werner P. Schulz]

Why is it imperative to "take root"? That seems an odd way for things to be set up.

... you are right! It also works for simple user knoppix - just tested it for my own,

[Werner P. Schulz]

... oh! I have make a mistake - it doesn't work for user "knoppix"; I tested at the wrong location

On extern usb-drive I can not work as user knoppix. Either i work in the second instance of PCManFM as root or root creates a storage folder and "chown" it for user knoppix.

I think, the first way is easier to use for knoppix novice.

Greetings Werner * http://www.wp-schulz.de/knoppix/summary.html
Own Rescue-CD with Knoppix (Knoppix V6.4.4 remaster)

[Forester]

Why is it imperative to "take root"? That seems an odd way for things to be set up.

My thought exactly.

So I stuck in a USB stick and Knoppix added the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,shortname=winnt,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0

So I typed in (look Mum, no sudo):

mount /media/sdc1
fgrep sdc1 /etc/fstab

and got:

/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0000,dmask=0000,allow_utime=0022,codepage=cp850,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=winnt,errors-remount-ro 0 0

Taking the letters rw as a good sign, I tried (without sudo):

touch /media/sdc1/werner
rm /media/sdc1/werner

and got no error. So I did:

pcmanfm &
pcmanfm &

and dragged and dropped arbitrary file from my the file manager open at my home directory to the file manager open on the usb top-level directory and again got no error. I deleted the file again using the file manger and again no error. I opened nothing as a root window.

What have I got wrong ? Installing to USB ? Using the DVD edition ? Running the KDE desktop instead of the latest toy ? Or did I just cheat by using the command line ?

Every release the GUI seems to change and people are all lost, confused or frustrated because the hack they used to use no longer works. Here's me typing in the same kind of thing I did 30 years ago (before there were PCs and stuff) and, "well, knock me down with a feather", it still works.

Cheers,