A bit hairy

[Harry Kuhman]

Ok, NTFS read/write questions are probably getting old here, but this one is a bit different.

No, pretty much the same.

In short, I have no access to XP (hda1), which is in NTFS. It's startup files are corrupt beyond repair, and I'm attempting to access it using Knoppix 3.8 and copy over the files from there onto my external USB HD. I havn't had any luck so far dealing with read/write permissions, but there has to be something I'm missing.

And if there isn't, what other solutions are there? Would formatting my USB HD in FAT32 help at all?

So you're saying that the external drive is not FAT now, but NTFS? And you don't see a problem there, being that Knoppix can't safely write to any NTFS partition?

Formatting in FAT might help, but, particularly with the recent 3.8.x releases a growing number of people are having problems seeing their USB drives under Knoppix. Can you see the drive under Knoppix now (actually see the files on the drive)? If so then I would expect that putting a FAT partition out there would help a lot. If not then I don't have a lot of hope that reformatting with FAT will help (although I can't say for sure that it will not).

Are there easier ways of transporting 15+ gigs of data than through Knoppix/USB HD?

Sure there are. Firewire external drives are faster than USB2 drives, for example (don't be fooled by any spec that claims that USB2 is faster than firewire, it's just lying with numbers). And if you have USB1.1 then 15 gig will take, well, how old are you now? There's moving the data across a network to another computer. Either with Samba or by booting the other computer into Knoppix too, assuming it has a FAT partition. Or even other software tools like FTP that would let you transfer the files somewhere. But the "best" tool depends on what you have available to you, and having an external drive that you are willing to make a FAT partition on is better than some people have, assuming that Knoppix sees it.

And I still don't have a definative answer whether Knoppix 3.8 can write fully on NTFS or whether it can only replace equal amounts of info.

AFAIK, the answer is don't let it write to NTFS at all.