Are there any Linux live CD's out there that have full NTFS read/write support? I had a Windows XP system crash a while back and wanted to copy some files from the system drive to the other drive before I overwrote the system drive with a backup I had made earlier. Unfortunately, the Windows Recovery Console wouldn't let me copy most files so I gave a Liux live CD a try to no avail. I had heard that NTFS write write support is no longer as experimental as it used to be and was wondering if any of the live CD's (especially nice ones with X11 and automount features) had starting supporting it yet.

-Brandon

NTFS write is still very experimental, however read is okay so what's stopping you copying the files from the NTFS partition to an ext3 partition you could create or even burning them to DVD or CD. You can manage that easily from most LiveCDs

...Because the computer I would be using it on has two 60 GB NTFS drives with no room for a Linux-writable partition.

as far as I know, the latest knoppix (3.7?) has read/write.

Ah, but is it safe?

You can't get it to be safe in linux yet so the answer is no. Both 60GB partitions are 100% full? You could boot from linux and maybe copy the data over a network to a different computer or burn it onto DVD/CD or some other form of removable media. There are plenty of safe ways to do it but writing to an NTFS filesystem isn't one of them.

Well, I could copy from one drive to the other if I had a good way to do it. That is exactly why I was hoping for a Linux distro with safe NTFS writing. The Windows Revocery Console doesn't allow you to copy files or even access most directories without enabling it with a certain command. The only problem is that in order for the command to do what it is supposed to do, you have to first enable a certain option from Windows. Do you see the conflict here? If you are using the recovery console, it's probably because your Windows system won't boot so there is no way to enable the option you need. So, basically, unless you are anticipating trouble, you are out of luck. Although, with Windows, maybe that's not such an unreasonable thing to expect.

As for backing up to disc, I use the Symantec Ghost bootable disc for backing drives up when things go wrong but even with its best compression, it still takes up a lot of space. For examples, last time my Windows system bombed, it took 6 DVD's and a couple hours to burn everything from my Windows partition.

I'm sure FAT32 read/write support is safe, correct? Perhaps you could copy those NFTS drives temporarily to a FAT32 drive.

I don't know for sure, but I think Suse has NTFS support built in. In fact, I think it resized an NTFS partition of mine before installing itself on the remainder of the disk, and then mounted the NTFS partition automatically. But I don't know if it is "safe"

Same thing happened to me last week - win crash.....

SLAX Live CD has been, by far, a great companion. I've been able to burn all backup using the k3d burning feature... But, I was in the same boat you're in..... Wanting to access NTFS for read/write, not just read... Can't find a linux distro that does it yet, but I will try the newest Knoppix to test...

(this is probably taboo here) - but if you need to rescue data from a drive and need to write to NTFS from a live CD, try BartPE... It's a rescue-type live bootable CD which comes with some standard file management software. Boots into a win32 gui environment. Not ideal as a live OS (like Slax/Suse/Knoppix), but for read/write to ntfs and other simple data management functions, it's pretty good...

BartPE Builder

In my crash scenario - I have used the SLAX live cd to burn the backup data, Ultimate Boot Disk CD to configure partition and boot information, and BartPE to move data from one disk to the other - both NTFS...

Good luck!