A friend of mine runs Win XP from a Maxtor SATA drive. This week, the drive went belly up, leaving him high and dry. He used an older drive to restore a previous backup, but wanted to get some data off the Maxtor. XP couldn't read any drive contents, but he got some joy from a little dos utility. However, it truncated all the filenames making them effectively useless, as well as only reading a small number of files in the first place.

Enter Knoppix 3.3
I booted the machine from CD, then used Konqueror to transfer all the readable data from the damaged drive to his current one. He was amazed at the speed of booting, that it could access the web and, of course, that it could read and transfer the necessary data.

Quote from his email -
"That knocks the socks off any other data recovery programs then. Am I
impressed or am I impressed? Fantastic."

Hopefully, he will get to see it as more than just a data recovery program.

Cool - Live cds are excellent. I'm surprised MS hasn't 'appropriated' the idea.

They would probably make it a DOS prompt and charge $50 on it

So cynical

They probably tried, but worked out thqat you'd need either 3 Live CDs or a Live DVD!

I doubt it. They are very greedy. Also, think of it this way. You're Microsoft. You have a 90% market share. Now, you charge $$$ for your product. How would you make it a live CD and add a trial sort of thing? That's insane, you cannot without writing to disk. They reformat and more free XP Live.

I had a similar experience, trying to get data out of a system that had been crippled by a botched Win XP installation. XP's crappy installer program sensed that there was a bad install present on the hard drive, but its "recovery console" sucked eggs and was virtually useless. The drive in question was originally partitioned into two sections, and the recovery console refused to allow access to the secondary partition (D:\ under Windows). I used TomsRtBt to mount D: and get the data onto floppies. If I had had access to Knoppix at the time, it probably would've been a little easier.