Attempting a Knoppix LiveCD HDD rescue, need help

[mrgeetar45]

A friend of mine has a laptop whose hard drive recently started clicking, indicating imminent failure. Upon restarting he was unable to boot into XP. Unfortunately, he has some business records on the drive that must be rescued ASAP.

At the advice of some comrades on another more informal forum I am going to try and save his data using a Knoppix LiveCD. I did a good bit of research and I believe that we have a reasonable shot of recovering the files and moving them either to a web-based file storage service I use or onto a ZIP disk. Before I dive into this, however, I wanted some feedback.

1. Should Knoppix have any trouble reading an NTFS partition?

2. My friend has a Netgear FA310TX PC Card Ethernet adaptor, which from what I can gather is tulip-compatible. Have any of you had any experience with this card or others in the FA31x family on Linux?

3. If for some reason tulip and the Netgear card don't get along, he also has a Linksys wireless card (can't remember the model number, but it's a standard model). Does Knoppix have support for wireless cards? If so, how hard are they to configure?

4. Failing the network rescue, we'll try to move the data onto a ZIP disk. The ZIP drive is a USB device -- will this pose any problems?

5. After this, he'll be getting a new HDD and looking to put Linux on it. He has no Linux experience at all, but he's an apt student. What would be a good distro to use on a laptop for a first-timer who only needs email, web browsing, OpenOffice and GnuCash?

[Skythra]

my fa311 installed/worked flawlessly (ie: out of the box) on my old system. (p2 233)

If that helps.

[Chris H]

1. No problem whatsoever. Just mount the partition.

2. Dunno

3. Dunno

4. USB shouldn't be any problem.

5. Gnucash is a sod to get working on Slack . Suggest Yoper ( check repositories for gnucash) or Mandrake unless he's willing to get his hands dirty, then go Gentoo.

[Giro]

Yeh it should all work out of the box all you will need to do is mount the drive, And for a good distro search the forums there are quite a few posts on it.