M$ 7 on my new laptop (one month out of warranty)has died. I have several iso files and several downloaded programs that I wish to put on DVDs before I do a restore. I have tried Slax, Kubuntu, and Mint from USB live boot. None of them will let me burn the files to DVDs. My largest USB stick is 4gig. K3b in Slax shows that I don't have enough temp file space, but will not let me use the hard drive for temp.
Options I am considering:
Getting a larger USB stick.
Booting from CD and copying up to 4gigs at a time and moving it to my desk top.
Resizing the ntfs partition to give me about 20-30gigs for installing Slackware.
Buying an external hard drive and copy them to it. (starting to really like this one)
Forgetting it and restore and spend many hours downloading them again. (Really would rather not)

I can do any of these options, but want to see if there is an option I haven't considered.

Sounds like the far and away easiest option is to get the external drive and copy the files to it from a live environment. I suppose you could resize the NTFS partition and install a distro on there, but that seems like a lot of work just to copy some files.

1 members found this post helpful.

I have never had that problem. I use live cd's and usb's all the time to recover data.

Are you using the "tormam" options. Not sure it would matter.

Dunno why it is saying temp file space unless you have some setting in the burner for speeding up by caching or other saved data for second disk.

Other options are networked shares to some other computer. It is pretty easy to do even a live install of some ftp client if not installed then to a filezilla server share or other ftp server.

1 members found this post helpful.

I use Puppy 4.2.1 all the time to save peoples personal files before fixing a crashed Windows, but it is usually no more than 1 gig. I just copy them to a flash drive for safe keeping. I have all of my personal files saved to the HD and flash. I have never tried burning 4+ gigs under a live boot. I have about a dozen distro isos not to mention Libreoffice, Gimp2, Openoffice, and many more opensource programs.

I did consider network transfering to my desktop, but neither the LAN nor the WiFi are recognized under any live boot I've tried. The laptop is a cheap POS I bought at Walmart. Long story, but the charge port went bad on my old one and I needed a laptop at 11:00pm on a Sunday. The worst part is I fixed my old laptop and sold it to a co-worker and three days later my new one crashed. I bought the cheapest thing they had and have later discovered that this is a cheap Toshiba only available at Walmart. From now on anything I download will be saved to the shared folder on my desktop! Maybe it being such a cheap computer has something to do with the problem of burning DVDs.

I'm thinking the external HD is going to be the quickest and easiest way. I could use one anyway for cloning HDs when someone wants to get a bigger one.

Thanks for the replies.

Not really solved, but I fixed the problem without burning the DVDs. Got a 2tb external hard drive today at Best Buy for only $119. The 3tb were $149, but sold out. Don't know how long the sale last. Thanks for the help!