Ryndal

My sister's laptop recently went down from the system registry getting corrupted. And of course XP's repair tool failed me, so i popped in a knoppix CD from the linux for dummies book. Now i can get to her files on the laptop. Trouble is, i have nowhere to put them. Her CD burner is shot.
I have a Seagate 120GB external harddrive plugged into the laptop, but knoppix doesn't seem to be registering it.
Has anyone else had this problem or have any advice? I'd really appreciate anything you guys can offer me. thanks

yakvan

I have similar problem so if you find the answer please post back here.

Someone told me to "mount the drive" but I havent figured out how to do that. I suppose we can try something like

mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/sda

Not sure what that does but I read it somewhere and sda is scsi, I guess the 4 can be any number not already used but I really have no idea.

you may need "su root" before doing this

psic

Yes, you will probably have to mount the drive (I say probably because some live distros mount usb devices automatically).

To find out more about the mount command, you can do 'man mount'. To mount a external usb disk, first do 'su' (this is so you have administrator privilages), then
. Make sure you make a folder in /mnt called sda1, so knoppix can mount your usb disk to it. After you've copied the files, make sure to unmount it with the umount command. Google can help more, or you might check this out.

yakvan

I tried external hard drive and several thumb drives but could NOT get any USB device detected. My problem was the IDE hard drive showed up as SDA1 and SDA2 and I think that somehow messed up the SCSI detection.

At any rate, I rescued my files by transfering from 1 computer to another using SAMBA. Just put the laptop on a network and use knoppix start menu to pick KNOPPIX > SERVICES > SAMBA and will make the files accessible to the network. Worked great for me (other than being slower than external hard drive)

In more detail...when SAMBA starts it will automatically make username="knoppix" and give any passowrd you want. Also answer YES when it asks "want to make files available". Then go to any maachine on network and should be able to see "knoppix" under entire network and click on knoppix and when asked for user/password type "knoppix" and whatever password you set.

I never used Knoppix before and cant believe how easy and well it worked. Windows pales by comparison both in cost and in stability. Microsoft ought to incorporate knoppix into windows to do recovery.

psic

I've done quite a few different sorts of rescues with knoppix, kanotix and damn small linux (because it goes on one of those tiny cd's ). There's even distros which can be used to crack windows passwords (yes, I know people who have managed to forget even those )

Ryndal

ok, thanks for the input. Turns out downloading the most recent version of knoppix cleared up my problem of detecting/mounting the external harddrive. Now i have a new set of problems that i'll probably put on a new thread.
*edit*
scratch that.
It's looking like i can't do any modifications of the external harddrive. Cannot copy stuff to the external from the files that were in the damaged windows OS.
essentially i have a bunch of media files that i'd like to dump on the external, but knoppix, or rather Konqueror tells me that it can't make new directories.
"Could not make folder /media/sda1/AMVmusics"
so i can't get stuff from hda1 to sda1. my friend told me it might be an issue of permissions. I don't know though. The GUI made it look like i had all the permissions i needed. Although i might just be dead wrong.
*edits again*
also i can't seem to delete files either

KyKo

What file system is your external hard drive using? If it is NTFS that would be why you can't write to it. Linux and writing to NTFS are like oil and water. If it's NTFS then format it to the linux-friendly Fat32 or another file system or your choosing.

Ryndal

nope, looks like the external is FAT32.

KyKo

Well I would suggest opening a root terminal and then launching Konqueror from the terminal, if you wish to use konqueror to accomplish your goal. If you need two instances of it then open two root terms and launch it twice. Then you will be running konqy as root. Good luck.

Filipet

u cannot write on any partition at default.
in documentation writes how to make partitions writable.