Booting NOT-Windows

[Coleman Kane]

On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 14:25 -0400, Peg Harris wrote:
> I realize this isn't a Linux question, but maybe there's a Linux
> answer ;)
>  
> I have a Dell laptop, that should be running XP, and is less than a
> year old.  This morning, it decided that there was a file missing and
> it won't completely boot.  It doesn't even want to do a "SAFE" boot.
> I put in XP's "recovery CD" and that lands me into a recovery console
> (which is basically a DOS prompt.)  I figured if I can at least backup
> some of my significant files, I won't even mind reinstalling the whole
> system, since there aren't too many "extras" (just a few freebies,
> like Open Office and Gimp) installed.
>  
> If I boot into this recovery mode with my external USB disk plugged
> in, I can see files on the main hard drive and on this USB disk.  But,
> I can not copy from one to the other.  I called Dell support, and was
> told that since the initial installation did not give the
> "Administrator" account a password, I've missed out on some useful
> recovery tools (that would have been a nice warning to get during the
> install.) 
>  
> Since this machine has the ability to boot off a USB device or a CD, I
> wonder if I can boot up something else that will see all of my other
> disks, and let me copy my XP files onto my USB drive before I end up
> shipping this machine back to Dell (who said they'd just blindly
> replace the hard drive) or reinstalling from scratch.  
>  
> Peg

Peg,

You may want to look into KNOPPIX:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

It comes with the NTFS-3G FUSE driver, which I have heard is pretty good
at reading most of the newer features of NTFS in WinXP+. I don't know
about writing.

-- 
Coleman Kane