Hello

Someone I know seems to have lost an important file and asked if there
was a way to undelete it.

Users have recommended different solutions, including NTFS Undelete.
I just downloaded, burned, and tried the ISO image... only to find out
it's not a bootable, live CD, but rather a Windows program, ie. it
requires booting into Windows and running it from the CD, which is not a good idea since the first thing to do in this case is to quit the OS to prevent it from using those newly available sectors to write new data.

If someone's been there before recently... can a Linux-based live CD try and recover files recently deleted in an NTFS partition?

Thank you.

Probably easier with a Windows one, there are plenty of live cd's out there, some even come with recovery tools - Bart, MiniPE etc

cheers

Try ultimate boot cd or any disk with testdisk or photorec.

I would take the hard drive out, and put it in your Linux box. Make an image of the partition with dd, I wouldn't do anything with the hard drive before this because you could risk overwriting the files. Only work with the image. Next you can try tools like Lazarus or Foremost to "undelete" the lost files.

Thanks for the tip. When I tried building a Windows live CD, it didn't work well (bad video, etc.)

I'll check Lazarus, Foremost, and UltimateCD et al. with Testdisk and Photorec.