I have tried puppy, knoppix, and nimblex all trying to copy the contents of a crashed drive to an external. They all have problems writing to the external even though it is listed as "(rw)" I guess because a liveCD doesn't want to touch the installed system (?)

What is the most powerful linux liveCD which allows one to write from anything to anything else with all safety turned off?


rK

It's really simple to mount it -rw manually.
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdxX /path/to/the/folder -rw

All should have worked.

Could it be that the crashed drive is the cause of the issue?

No the "crashed" drive is a windows drive with a nasty virus on it. There's nothing physically wrong with it. I tried the"ultimate boot cd for windows" but my DOS is a little rusty.

What I'd like to find is a good, all purpose, diagnostic and repair Linux LiveCD.


If I could only have one Linux LiveCD which would it be?

rK

If there's nothing physically wrong with the drive, you could still mount it:
mount -t vfat /dev/sdxx /path -rw
that's it.

As far as live cd's for system rescue, I like System Rescue CD. http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

I'll try to manually mount it next. Thanks for that syntax example :-)


rK

I went with Ubuntu installation CD and never had to mount anything. As soon as I ran the installation CD as a live CD, I was given a beautiful GUI. It was apparent it even recognized the video card on my machine. From then on, it was simply drag and drop for me!

Rabitcide,

Is the internal disc a SATA drive or IDE? I am assuming IDE, but I wanted to mention on this topic that Knoppix does not support SATA drives, so it doesn't work well as a rescue cd on modern computers. In your scenario, if you had a bad SATA drive and wanted to rescue it using knoppix, you would need to put it into an external drive enclosure and perhaps put the target drive inside your computer or in a second external drive enclosure.

Again, this info is probably irrelevant to your situation as the difficulty you would have encountered would have been in mounting the SATA internal drive.

good luck!

I just recently had to recover some data off a windows pc ravaged by malware.

SystemRescueCD is what I used. But any live CD with ntfs-3g installed will give you rw support for a windows partition.

Assuming for example that /dev/sda1 is your windows partition, and there exists a mount point /mnt/windows, do
Obviously you can create your own mount point as you wish.

I get it now. It was not mounted under ntfs3g rw. The gui ought to let you mount it either way as a choice too.

I tend to like the top distro's listed on distrowatch.com. The top ten or twenty usually have a live version.

This is what I did:

using SystemRescue CD


mkdir /mnt/external
mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external -rw

The permissions are dr-x------!

I don't know why I can't write here. I won't get a chance to try "ntfs-3g" command because DOS is doing the job with "xcopy c: d: /s /e"


rK

I don't think you're right about this one. Maybe your experience is with a very old copy of Knoppix.

No. mount with 3g.

http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount.ntfs-3g

hi

your malware may relate to this last great effort from ms

http://itnews.com.au/News/167237,mic...th-update.aspx

recommend....you see the light now....move to the tunnel where humans will give you a virtual hug and help move away from the dark side
err I means get rid of ms