knoppix and a external hard drive

[ronhonda]

Hey,
I am new to all this so bear with me.
My Dell PC had crapped out on me (BSOD) I have tried various "fixes" to try to get it up and running with no success. I could just reformat the PC but I don't want to lose all my photos and a bunch of songs that I either purchased or have in itunes. I stumbled upon an article about Knoppix and decided to give it shot. Mind you I am no computer wizard, but I am not afraid to try some things on my own before I have a "professional" try. Well I was able to locate all the files that i want to save/keep, but here is my problem. USB thumb drives are to small to hold all the files that I am trying to keep.(about 40 gigs worth) I tried a external hard drive, but knoppix was not reading the hard drive. Can someone point me in the right direction to find an external/portable hard drive that will work. Also I was using version 3.9 of knoppix. should I use the latest version?

[Harry Kuhman]

Knoppix can usually access an external hard drive, a newer version may help. But keep reading before you rush to do this.

If the external hard drive is formatted as FAT32 then you should be fine. But if it is formatted as NTFS then your version of Knoppix certainly can't write to it. Some people believe that the newest versions of Knoppix can safely write to NTFS, but I personally would not risk this unless the drive was empty and just being used to transfer the files elsewhere. Backup the NTFS drive files before taking any additional risk.

A much cleaner way to recover files with Knoppix is across a wired network. install a FTP server on the system that you wish to send the files to. Boot Knoppix on the bad system and confirm that you can ping the destination system. Then use Konquror as an FTP client to send files to the other computer by FTP.

[moon]

Is not being able to write to NTFS a Linux issue or something unique to Knoppix? Thanks..

[Harry Kuhman]

It's a Linux issue. Or, many would say, a Microsoft issue, as Microsoft will not release full NTFS specs and many believe is actively working to keep Linux from working will with the NTFS file system. As I said, it was the case back when your 3.x version of Knoppix was made. Some users now trust the newer versions of Linux (although even many of them warn you to have your data backed up before taking the risk). I don't yet trust it. If you do, then try Knoppix 5.1.1. I'll stick with making transfers across a network, which is safe.

[ihawk60]

I was pleasantly surprised to find and recover my files from a "dead" hard drive using the latest version of Knoppix. The only complicated part (after I bought the a trusty usb flash drive) was getting knoppix to mount and change the USB drives status to read/write. After that it was easy using Konquerer to pick the directories needed to copy and off to the USB drive they went. I also had to issue only a few small commands to get my wireless card to start flashing and access to the internet was obtained without the hard drive using firefox. Because of this success, I'll always keep a boot disk around in case another hard drive crashes.