Another "recover data from windows" thread

[Harry Kuhman]

I have tried to fix the mbr with the windows recovery console, tried a plethora of commands to no avail.

Yea, in my experience it's pretty useless. Did you try a simple DOS disk, as suggested?

I have also tried to use testdisk to fix it, but that didn't do anything either.

Testdisk, when it runs, can correct a bad partition table. But it does not replace the boot code in the MBR, so if that's your problem then no surprise that it doesn't fix it. Can you better define the problem, the original post was a mix of potential problems.

The active partition is set correctly, gpart says so itself.

OK, I thought that your original post said that the new windows partition was not the active partition.

The disk im trying to copy my data to is fat32, i can mount it and everything, but when i try to copy my files onto it it says that i do not have the write permissions even though i changed them!

There should be an icon on the Knoppix desktop for the partition icon question. If you're certain that it's FAT and not NTFS, then you can try to right click on it and select an option from the menu that comes up to make it writeable. You can also look at man mount and see how to explicitly mount the partition as read/write, by default Knoppix will mount windows partitions as read only. However, I really think that it's a better approach to transfer the files across a network by FTP.

About FTP, won't that take ages to send the data over? what other options do i have? I need to extract about 100GB of data.

Actually, FTP is much faster than windows networking for transferring the same files on a local network. 100 gig will take some time, but perhaps not as much as you expect. USB drives are notoriously slow also, so FTP still seems wise to me, even now knowing how much that you want to move. And I consider the approach much more reliable, I've seen too many problems moving large FAT partitioned drives between operating systems.