Need to Save a Windows Installation Using Linux :)

[Audax321]

Hello,

My roommate's computer (WinXP) just got a virus and killed itself. The virus is gone, but Windows refuses to boot up now and he has a lot of stuff he needs to backup before formatting. We tried repairing and reinstalling Windows, but that is not working (he should have just listened to me and installed SuSE ). So, I was wondering if it would be possible to use a Linux LiveCD to at least get Samba working and then copy the files (from an NTFS partition) over the network to another Windows computer (FAT32 partition).

Basically, what is a good LiveCD distro to accomplish this?

Thanks.

[dylunio]

I'm not sure about the live cd thing but why not plug the xp hard drive into the linuxbox, and then mount the xp hard drive, and copy the files to the hard drive or burn the files to cd;

dylunio

[andrewdodd13]

ive done this before with Knoppix, the NTFS boot sector got screwed [by fedora core 2 iirc] and i had to start again, but knoppix could lift files off the NTFS drive and burn them to a CD/DVD. since iv got a globespan chipset i couldnt compile the drivers at the time and use the net, but a DVD done the job

[Audax321]

Thought about that, but the way the computer is set up that isn't an option. The files need to be copied to one hard drive and the linux installation is on another hard drive. We won't be able to connect the drive that way because we also need the CD-R drive to burn some stuff. I guess it would be possible if we took the DVD drive out, but it would just be a mess and take forever.. not to mention I don't want to risk the virus still being somewhere and writing itself to my computer (I still have WinXP on a parition of my drive with Linux). I remember that happened a long time ago and we literally had the virus running around our network for awhile...everytime we cleaned one computer it showed up on another. I read about people using Knoppix with LinNeighborhood just now on Google, so I'm going to give that a try and see how it goes.

[Stormblazer]

If you're using linux to get the files off the NTFS partition, there's no way it could infect XP because any viruses that affect XP won't even run in Linux, let alone cause damage. As well, Linux is unable to write to NTFS partitions yet, only read from them.