[SOLVED] How to retrieve files before reinstall?

[kc123]

Hi,

Windows XP will not boot, and I am going to have to reinstall it. But I need to get to my files before they are deleted during the reinstall.

I downloaded the Trinity Rescue Kit and burned it onto a CD, and I have an external hard drive on hand. I am able to boot from the CD, but once I get to the command prompt, I really do not know where to go from there. I would really appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction. I know next-to-nothing about Linux.

Thank you!

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Execute this code at command prompt and post output here :

fdisk -l

I dont know if Trinity Rescue Kit support NTFS write access or not. I would suggest you to try PartedMagic LiveCD. Its just around 30MB download and supports NTFS write access too.

[kc123]

Thanks for the PartedMagic tip!

So I'm not sure if this is what you were suggesting, but
in the Terminal, at the command prompt,

root@PartedMagic:~#

I entered,

fdisk -l


This was the output:

Disk /dev/hda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units - cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf26bf26b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 12161 97683201 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units - cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x41ffc810

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id SYstem
/dev/sda1 * 1 38912 312560608+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

[khafa]

hi,


here you have 2 disks and i suppose that the 320GB disk is your external disk.
if that is the case from the command line(where you ran fdisk -l) you do as follows.

mkdir backup windows
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 windows
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 backup

(if you get an error while mounting ntfs-3g replace it with ntfs)

if you came up to here that means you can access your disks now. all you need to do is to move around with cd and to copy files from windows to backup with cp

[kc123]

That's great. I found my files! Thank you so much to the both of you for your time and help.