NTFS-3G question

[Texas Dude]

I'm not a Linux newbie, but a casual user, not hard-core. The newbie forum seemed like an appropriate place to post so here goes. I'll try to keep this question as brief and succinct as possible.

The question: does anyone know of a light-footprint, live-Linux distro featuring NTFS-3G integration? I need it for data recovery purposes.

The background:

A) I accidentally disabled a badly under-resourced (256 Mb memory - no dedicated video card) Windows-XP box by renaming a driver file I mistakenly thought was a third-party, non-essential driver.

B) The result is a blue screen with a hex 7B error message.

C) I can resolve the problem by formatting the hard drive and re-laying the O/S. No big deal, right? Wrong! The heart of the matter is I don't have a recent back-up of the data on the drive. I can resolve that issue by pulling the hard drive (58 Gb of data), plugging into another Windows box (NT-4 or better) as a non-boot drive and backing up to my portable hard drive. I'd prefer to avoid that hassle.

D) If I can rename the problem driver file from a live-Linux distro I think I can avoid C).

E) I've tried Fedora-9 live which boots fine and then locks up. Ditto, Xubuntu-8.04. At this point, I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks!
Texas Dude

[rokytnji]

Knoppix or Live Mandriva should work on 256 mb.
NimbleX is another alternative and also Slax.

[Jonathan183]

Something like PartedMagic may do what you want ... older versions use ntfs-3g driver and provide a separate mount utility ... it should be a quicker download than most distros, its really there for disk operations and does not contain too much additional.

[jayd512]

There is also the SystemRescueCD.