I’ve got a computer whose Windows install is well and truly broken. However, it can boot from a Knoppix CD, and the other contents of the hard drive appear to be intact.
I’ve also got an external NTFS hard drive, and a laptop running Windows XP.
I want to get files from computer #1 onto the external hard drive. There are apparently a number of possible methods to do this, but none have been successful so far. Could someone familiar with this version of Linux pick the one they consider the easiest/most likely to succeed, and tell me how to make it do what I want?
From a command prompt, type: df
You’ll get a list of devices and mountpoints. Leftmost entry on each line is the device name, rightmost is where in the filesystem it’s mounted.
The internal disk will likely be /dev/sda and the USB disk will likely be /dev/sdb. Say they were mounted at /media/internaldisk and /media/usbdisk for example, you could copy the contents of the internal drive to a directory on the USB disk like so:
mkdir /media/usbdisk/olddata
cd /media/internaldisk
tar cvfp - * | (cd /media/usbdisk/olddata && tar xfp -)
Hope this helps
Will your instructions get around the problem of not being able to write to the drive by default when attempting to use the GUI to copy and paste?