Going crazy trying to recover some files

[brownpaw]

Hello, I'm going kind of crazy here trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Long story short, had some corruption on a friend's HD in their Macbook Pro and it will not boot into OS X any longer.

I am running a Knoppix LiveCD to try to recover some documents and pictures. The hard drive mounts fine and I can browse through most of it, except for some folders that appear to be locked (which are, guess what, the documents and pictures folders under my friend's username folder). I am unable to browse them -- it just gives me a

error opening directory / permission denied.

I found an older forum post saying to just do a "sudo cp -r" in the terminal to move stuff in those folders elsewhere. The weird thing is that this works for SOME files, but not all of them. Some of them it just says

cannot copy... invalid argument

with no further explanation.

Another issue is that for some of the files, there are symbolic links (when there is a sym link it explicitly states this in terminal). I know that I need to use a drive formatted with a file system that supports sym links, but everything but a FAT32 drive I have refuses to be written to.

How on earth do I make Knoppix just freaking work? Is there a better LiveCD distro for saving a HFS+ partition that "just works"? Overall I'm a Linux beginner, but honestly it's because every single thing I have ever wanted to do in Linux requires hours of Google searching, and usually trying to adapt some dated 8-year-old forum answer to my current situation.... usually I end up giving up on Linux for another year or so.

Can anyone help me out? Thanks


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