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My hard disk went nuts on me last saturday. Windows wouldnt boot, my files couldnt be recovered with Symantec Ghost, and it seemed like the disk was completely dead. I booted up my PC using a bootable Linux disk (Knoppix 3.4) and it somehow reads my HDD. The HDD runs REALLY slow but still works for some reason in linux. The problem is it says that I dont have enough permissions to view the files. Is there any way to get around this? If anybody can tell me how to get at the files so I can back them up I would appreciate it a lot. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
What version of Windows? If it's an XP drive or 2000 with NTFS filesystem, you can only read, but not write. This can be good however, because if you get another drive to install onto, you can always use Knoppix to copy files to the new drive (if it's vfat instead of NTFS). I had the same issue about a year ago, but by the time I got a new drive ready, the old one started making a really loud grinding sound... I took it apart and started using it as an example to people that have me work on their computers. No big loss, but would have liked to get my text documents off first.
Originally posted by digitalhead What version of Windows? If it's an XP drive or 2000 with NTFS filesystem, you can only read, but not write. This can be good however, because if you get another drive to install onto, you can always use Knoppix to copy files to the new drive (if it's vfat instead of NTFS). I had the same issue about a year ago, but by the time I got a new drive ready, the old one started making a really loud grinding sound... I took it apart and started using it as an example to people that have me work on their computers. No big loss, but would have liked to get my text documents off first.
Thanks for the quick reply. The drive is formatted for xp and yes I am getting a new drive. I have two Seagate Barracudas (7200RPM SATA) on the way and they will probably be here tomorrow or wednesday. Last time I had a drive die on me I just let it go but this time I have a lot more stuff that I really dont want to lose. Thanks a lot for the info.
I'm no expert on this, but Knoppix should give you ownership of files on any hard drive on the system - and by "you" I mean either user knoppix or the root user. I have not had to deal with rescuing NTFS drives, so I'm not sure what the deal with file ownership is, but if the worst comes to the worst you could always do a "chown -R knoppix /mnt/hda1" or whichever hard drive you're mounting (perhaps followed by a "chmod -R u+r /mnt/hda1") to explicitly give yourself permission to view all the files on the drive.
I recently helped out a friend with a non-booting Windows machine by starting the Samba server from the KDE menu (I was using Knoppix 3.7, I'm not sure if it's this easy on other versions) and then using another Windows machine connected through his router to download files from the bad HDD. He was astounded by the power and majesty of Linux in general and Knoppix in particular - and this is a bloke who works in IT!
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