data transfer

[rundream]

hi thanks for helping in advance
i use windows and i have 2 discs one has windows millenium one has windows xp
the millenium edition doesnt start up because of... well its millenium so nough said
the xp is just having partition problems because the drive was seperated as 2 diff drives
i cant start the discs normally without getting blue screen messages.

Im using knopix OS from cd and i got full access to both drives so my idea was to trans important files from one drive to another and reformat then do again etc.... so i coudl have both drives

problem is i have no idea how to trans the files from drive to drive while in knopix.
i get a message when i try to copy from one drive to the next that says i cant
sorta like windows write protected message.

Can anyone tell me how to trans the files so i can get my life back
also if you can tell me how to do virus scanning, defrag, etc.... on knopix so i can scan my drives to see if i can get access after fixing them through knopix

thanks in advance

[Harry Kuhman]

Glad to hear that you can read the partitions in kNOPPIX. Unfortunately, writing to NTFS partitions has been a bit of a problem in Knoppix and Linux in general. While some people trust the current version of knoppix enough to risk writing to NTFS, many of us do not. And many of those who do still advise making good backups first, which obviously you can not do. If you have access to any other computer, I would strongly suggest transferring the files across a network to the other system. (I usually do this by setting up an FTP server on the destination system, but there are a number of ways to actually make the transfer.) Alternately, much space do you need for what you want to recover? Small flash drives formatted as FAT32 (and other FAT based partitions) can be written to safely and will save up to several gigs. Many e-mail accounts such as Gmail will give you more space, although the transfer up to it will likely take you some time.

[rcook]

You can shuffle the files between the partitions using KNOPPIX. It is possible to install NT on an emptied fat32 partition with your data files already in place and then use the MS convert utility to convert the NT partition to NTFS.

This has the disadvantage of having all of your data on a single hard drive, which has partition problems and may be flakey.

Another possibility would be to buy, or scrounge a second hard drive to install in the system and use it as a target and then reformat and test the problematic drive, before moving stuff back onto it.

I though I had posted this earlier, but I may have had a browser crash before it got posted. I had a tough day last Friday.

Dick