I have a Sony laptop and it does not boot into windows and XP recovery did not fix it (chkdsk: / R) In addition, the “SpinRite? disk utility says that the drive is in danger of failing and to backup data before attempting a fix. Well it came to mind to boot from Knoppix, I had heard that you can recover data in this manner.

So I booted boot from a Knoppix 4.02 DVD and can see and open windows docs and folders just fine on the Windows partitions (2) that are showing up on the Linux desktop. I can even see the thumbnail photos on JPG file icons which tells me the data is good.

I have an external USB drive that mounts fine on the Linux desktop. I formatted one partition as Linux ext 2 and the other is NTFS. Both partitions are free and clear of an important data so I can format these in any way that would enable the writing of the disk. I right clicked on both partitions and gave them all “read write" for everything, but I still can’t drag a file to the Linux EXT2 or the NTFS partition.

Any suggestions?