Saving a large container from crashed WinXP to external HD

Hi:
I need to copy a 4 GB container from a crashed WinXP Home system
in a Presario LA725 laptop into an external HD thru the USB port. Knoppix boots okay with acpi=off noscsi and i have saved all smaller files with a pen drive using the USB port. However, in the case of the external HD when i try to copy the large container Knoppix complains that it cannot write to NTFS drives. I use the Captive NTFS program and it seems to run okay but when i mount the external HD (called htds1 IIRC) and then try to make it writtable it complains again that it cannot write to NTFS drives. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Tito

I have had difficulties writing to large NTFS files, even if they exist at that size. I would write it off to an ext2 filesystem. There is a drive which can be installed to read ext2 f/s in Windows. I can vouch it works in win2K, I don't know if it works in XP

Prehaps useing qtparted and makeing a fat32 partition on the drive?

Thanks for your suggestions. I will try them if i can't simply copy the container to thed external HD.
I did the process again. I run Captive NTFS. It found the drivers. When it
finished i remounted the external HD (partition sda1) and when in Actions i try
to make it writtable Knoppix reports an error: "The remount command
failed. Maybe there is another the process accessing the file system
currently".
It looks like i am missing some simple step in the process.
Any help very much appreciated.
Thanks
Tito