IBM R51 - Windows crashed - booting w/ linux - save files?

**eyeaspire** · 10-28-2005, 04:54 AM

New Linux user here.

I have an IBM R51 laptop running Windows XP. It crashed w/ an "unmountable boot volume" screen. A friend of mine gave me a Knoppix Linux 3.2 CD to boot with. My machine booted wonderfully and I can see all of my files. When I try to copy and/or move my files to my Seagate backup drive, I get the message "Could not write to /name of drive/ name of file."

I've changed the read/write/execute permissions for my hard drive and Seagate drive. Note sure how to proceed.

Thoughts?

thx.
kelly

**Capt. Cautious** · 11-03-2005, 08:58 PM

Good Day eyeaspire ,
I've recovered a couple of HD's from horrid crashes and since I have a network available I just copy the data to the net drive than restore it to the new drive. Your problem however seems to be a NTFS write problem. I haven't tried the new version but my experience with Knoppix earlier versions is that they don't work as well in moving data in NTFS systems. Try formatting the seagate as a vfat drive, write the data to the seagate then convert the drive to ntfs if you are running xp. You might have to reload xp as vfat first. I suspect some of the real experts her can give you somewhat more detail. You might download v:3.8 or 3.9 rather than 3.2 Good Luck.

I Remain In Service,

Captain Cautious

**foamrotreturns** · 11-09-2005, 11:44 PM

One thing you need to be very sure about is the fact that NTFS file systems should NEVER be written to from Linux. Development has ceased on the captive driver, and it will probably not resume for quite some time. You are much better off rescuing your critical files by copying them to a fat32 (vfat) partition.

**Capt. Cautious** · 11-11-2005, 12:38 AM

Blessings Folks. I hope you get the problem solved. I just had a HD crash on one of our office machines and I really can not say enough good things abut Knoppix's recovery tools. Foamo is 100% right on the NTFS issue. I wish it were possible but as fast as they have worked a write Gates changes a critical line or something that breaks the ntfswrite. If someone hears of a good way to write back to NTFS I'd be thrilled to hear of it.

By My Hand I Remain~
Captain Cautious

**OErjan** · 11-11-2005, 06:51 PM

i think most of what you want is here in this FAQ, if not ask and we will try to help
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Rescue_FAQ

as for the external hdd, what does fdisk -l in a console say?