Member Avatar for Smartedpanda

Hi, I'm super new to this website just want to this real quick.
Alright, I'm using knoppix live cd on my computer using it as a save disk. Orginally I had XP Pro SP2. It crashed a week or two ago. I shoved in the knoppix cd and saw my files. =]
I then began to go into my crashed master drive and I tried to drag the files into my perfect slave drive.
The problem is I couldn't it said something along the lines of I don't have permission. I have a feeling it has to do with the previous OS of Windows.
How do I take off the permission? I just want to drag and drop files from my crashed master into my slave.

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Building on 's troubleshooting and on 's note that Knoppix could list the Windows files but dragging them produced "Permission denied", the quickest way to resolve this is to confirm how the Windows partition is mounted and to follow safe recovery steps. The commands below are practical from a Knoppix live session and aim to avoid further damage to a possibly flaky disk.

Identify mounts and kernel messages:

lsblk -f
blkid
mount | grep -i '/dev/sd'
dmesg | tail -n 30

Look for the filesystem type (NTFS/fat/ext) and mount flags (ro vs rw). If the Windows partition is mounted read-only or as a special NTFS driver, unmount and try a safe writable mount (replace /dev/sdXY and /mnt/windows):

sudo umount /dev/sdXY
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/windows
sudo ntfs-3g /dev/sdXY /mnt/windows

If ntfs-3g complains about an "unsafe" or dirty state, run a lightweight fix from Linux and then plan to run Windows chkdsk later:

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdXY

If the master drive shows I/O errors or the partition table looks damaged, avoid writing to it. Create an image with GNU ddrescue, then work from the image:

sudo apt-get install gddrescue
sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdX /media/otherdrive/image.img /media/otherdrive/rec.log
sudo mount -o loop,ro image.img /mnt/recover

For copying, prefer rsync (preserves files and can resume):

sudo rsync -av --progress /mnt/windows/important/ /media/destination/

Knoppix is a full Debian-based live Linux distribution; any permission-denied errors in a live session are usually about how the partition was mounted or about a disk being in an unsafe state. If the data is valuable and the drive is failing, imaging with ddrescue before further access is the safest course.

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Member Avatar for John A

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

Member Avatar for Smartedpanda

Well, the slave is just a data storage. It doesn't have Windows installed. I just ended up burning CD's of my files. I couldn't burn DVD's but all good.
I believe you were right about how Linux couldn't correctly read the NTFS.
Note: I used
knoppix


Which isn't really fully Linux right? ;)

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