Hello all,

I am sorry, this is truly in need of immediate attention. If you need more explanation, read past the next paragraph.

Long explanation short: I need something like Slax or Dropline GNOME that can copy data from an NTFS HDD to an external USB HDD (NTFS or FAT32) as quickly as possible.

I currently have a laptop HDD that earlier, by anyone's definition, had crashed. It, because of luck or some other higher power, is responding again.

It is running Windows, but I am afraid that it is too far gone for the OS to properly boot up. I have a portable USB HDD that is on the ready to receive the failing HDD's data but I need "safe" access to it.

Please help out! It contains a lot of data a fellow collegiate friend of mine really needs for his classes.

Thanks!

--davidguygc

Check out google for "rescue disk linux" and you should be good to go. With this one I was able to recover of 300.000 files from a deleted windows machine I bought on ebay

http://rip.7bf.de/current/

Heres a list of somemore with heads up what they do
http://www.hrlug.org/rescuedisk.html

Cheers Zhjim

I have changed the thread title to something calmer and more descriptive. Everyone's problems here are urgent, so please be patient.

Most modern Linux systems will read NTFS.

If the drive is in a state of disrepair, then you might want to consider cloning it first. You could clone it to a USB external drive, which would later be used for backup.