Giving up and paying money for real solution

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Giving up and paying money for real solution
started by: jrandom

Posted by jrandom on Oct. 29 2003,00:32

I've tried to like DSL, I really have. But it just doesn't work for me. I've been trying to use it to rescue a significant amount of data off a crashed and unsuccessfully repaired Win 2000 workstation with NO success. I've booted up and have tried to mount the NTFS file system, but kept running into roadblocks, mainly around permissions, where I couldn't even read the drive, and couldn't even log in as root to change the file permisisons (really hated these games about the root password, spent 2 hours trying to guess it with no success) Since time was of the essence, and the data was critical, I had to spend the money for ERD Commander and managed to get the data off. If I could have mounted and at least read the file system, I could have saved a significant amount of money. But apparently you can't do this running from the live CD.

Until I can get some way to more easily get at least read-only access to NTFS partitions for file recovery, I am going to recommend that people spend the money to buy ERD Commander and not waste the time to get DSL working, because of the difficulties in getting root and changing the attributes.

Posted by John on Oct. 29 2003,02:05

This is how you get root:
'sudo su'
If you are the type to need a visual do:
'sudo emelfm'
Then you would have a file manager with root permissions.

To mount ntfs (read only):
mkdir /mnt/(whatever)
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/(whatever)

Posted by sevengraff on Oct. 29 2003,04:01

Becoming root was in < the faq >

Knoppix is more useful as recovery tool than damn small linux...

Posted by EMLF on Oct. 29 2003,05:15

I think SystemRescueCD from François Dupoux is better as a rescue live-CD, since it can deal with NTFS partitions and comes w/ QTParted & PartImage; although nothing beats PQ's Partition Magic and even the part tool of Mandrake'a CD install

I do wish that our dear Damn Small Linux came w/ such disk tools

Hopefully John Andrews can see my request here

Posted by wiak on Oct. 29 2003,12:26

is on a pc(old nasty hd!) there cfdisk do not work and am root mooo using dsl on my laptop

Posted by roberts on Oct. 30 2003,01:24

Hmmm,
I booted off the liveCD on a win2000 machine. first I did

sudo fdisk -l /dev/hda that is a minus and the letter L

It showed one NTFS partition /dev/hda1 then I did

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

It mounted. Read only but that is what distros offer. I was able to copy files from the /mnt/hda1 to my home directory.

Posted by Robert Van den Heuvel on Oct. 30 2003,07:22

Hey guys, so howwww doooooo we mount RW from within DSL? Is it possible, as simple as saying something like:

mount /dev/sde1 -t ntfs /tmp rw

?

Posted by roberts on Oct. 30 2003,23:49

It is not possible from DSL or any other distro at this time.
The module to RW is still experimental. The developers are saying use at your own risk with a 99% chance that it will ruin the NTFS.

Probably the better way is through the network via a smb/cifs mount. Currently as of 0.4.10 that is not on the CD. But if you are HD installed then you could add the pkg smbfs.