On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 14:25 -0400, Peg Harris wrote: > I realize this isn't a Linux question, but maybe there's a Linux > answer ;) > > I have a Dell laptop, that should be running XP, and is less than a > year old. This morning, it decided that there was a file missing and > it won't completely boot. It doesn't even want to do a "SAFE" boot. > I put in XP's "recovery CD" and that lands me into a recovery console > (which is basically a DOS prompt.) I figured if I can at least backup > some of my significant files, I won't even mind reinstalling the whole > system, since there aren't too many "extras" (just a few freebies, > like Open Office and Gimp) installed. > > If I boot into this recovery mode with my external USB disk plugged > in, I can see files on the main hard drive and on this USB disk. But, > I can not copy from one to the other. I called Dell support, and was > told that since the initial installation did not give the > "Administrator" account a password, I've missed out on some useful > recovery tools (that would have been a nice warning to get during the > install.) > > Since this machine has the ability to boot off a USB device or a CD, I > wonder if I can boot up something else that will see all of my other > disks, and let me copy my XP files onto my USB drive before I end up > shipping this machine back to Dell (who said they'd just blindly > replace the hard drive) or reinstalling from scratch. > > Peg
Peg, You may want to look into KNOPPIX: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html It comes with the NTFS-3G FUSE driver, which I have heard is pretty good at reading most of the newer features of NTFS in WinXP+. I don't know about writing. -- Coleman Kane _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
