Several possibilities:
The hard drive is corrupted, and although the files are listed, Linux can't copy them because there's insufficient data. This could also attribute to why Windows XP crashed.
The slave drive isn't formatted/partitioned. In order for an operating system to store files on a hard disk, it must first have a filesystem. First of all, a partitioning program must create a usable partition. Then, it must be formatted. Lack of this will prevent file transfer to the slave drive.
The slave drive is formatted, but it's formatted to Microsoft's NTFS filesystem. Although Linux can read perfectly fine from this type of partition, support for writing to NTFS drives is nonexistent or not reliable enough to use. If you want to write data to a disk in this condition, you'll need to repartition/reformate the disk to something that Linux can read, such as ExtFS.
It might be a little bit difficult diagnosing which one is true, but here's what you can do: try copying a file from the damaged hard disk onto a floppy disk. If it works fine, then the problem lies with your slave drive and you should probably reformat/repartition it. If it fails with the same error message, then your hard disk is probably damaged, and you may want to bring it to a professional data recovery service if the data contained on your hard drive (or not) is valuable to you.
Hope this helps
Reputation Points: 2240
Solved Threads: 338
Vampirical Lurker
Offline 5,055 posts
since Apr 2006
Unsolved 
