Quote Originally Posted by OP4Latino
Hmm, that sucks.

The easiest solution (but expensive) I figured out is buying a External Harddisk (>$80)
Actually, I'm thinking that might be the fix too, and although I didn't mention it, I already have one.

I had a serious problem with it when I used it with both the Win98 and XP systems though. I had put two FAT partitions on it from the Win98 system. I moved it to the XP system and read and wrote some files. But when I moved back to the Win98 system I found that the partitions were severaly corrupted and all of the files were lost!!! Lost from the XP view at that point too. I've pulled the drive and have been trying various recovery techniques on-and-off fom the Win98 system, but so far have recivered very little.

I had seen a somewhat similar problem when I made a multi-boot Win95/Win98 system years ago. The problem tracked down to our good friends at Microsoft doing different LBA translations in each OS. So for certain capacity drives that used LBA, the sectors didn't map quite the same. In that case the problem only showed itself after I reached a certain block address on the drive, so I could fill it about 80% full of files before I destroyed everything with the LBA issue between the different OSs.

So after corrupting yet anoher hard drive with two different MS OSs, I decided to format the next disk as NTFS and just use the external drive with the XP notebook. That was the primary reason for getting it anyway, but it would have been nice to be able to move it between the desktop system and the notebook. But I can't afford to destroy another disk full f files doing so.

Since Knoppix can mount the NTFS partition read-only, it should be safe to move the hard drive over to this system and mount the NTFS partition from Knoppix. I would likely download the ISO with Bittorrent on the XP system (to avoid the older version of Bittorrent on Knoppix that gives me problems), and if it is over 4 gig then move the external hard drive to the desktop system system and try to burn the DVD from Knoppix. This still presents a couple of questions: Will Knoppix see my firewire external hard drive (it should but I've never had occasion to test that), and will it be able to burn to my new model DVD burner, and from an ISO out on the firewire drive? But it seems likely it may be the best approach I have available to me at this point.

I should also mention that my desktop system and a few other test systems I also keep running (including my Debian hard drive install system) all have one hard drive in a removable hard drive tray, so swapping hard drives between systems (other than the notebook) isn't a big issue. Can't put the firewire hard disk into the tray though, it's larger capacity than the hardware on the other systems will support.