Help!!!!

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Help!!!!
started by: bryanspellman

Posted by bryanspellman on June 02 2005,16:23

Been playing with DSL for a while on lap top but now the home desktop crashed. The main drive crashed but it might still have my data on it. XP tries to boot and it just sits in the XP logo with the moving blue bar under it, so I firgure the drive isn't totally shot.....I was wondering if I can use the DSL CD and boot from that and save my files onto a stick or CD-ROM?!?!

Thanks in advance.
Bryan

Posted by cbagger01 on June 02 2005,16:50

It should work.

Boot up DSL with USB stick attached
Open emelfm
Go to /mnt
Right-Click on your drive's partition mountpoint (hda1? hda2?)
Choose Mount from the menu
Right click on sda1 (You usb drive is probably sda1)
Choose Mount from the menu
Copy files over from your partition to your USB drive.
When finished, Right click on sda1 again.
Choose Unmount from the menu
Remove usb stick from computer.

Posted by clivesay on June 02 2005,16:58

If you have at least 128mb ram and a working net connection, you can load DSL into ram (dsl toram), install gtoaster or gcombust from the repository and burn the files to CD.

Chris

Posted by Fallen Kell on June 02 2005,17:32

I've had some issues in the past with using Knoppix to read from a NTFS filesystem, so you might run into these as well with DSL. Basically the system would freeze after doing 20-30 seconds of continuous reads from a NTFS filesystem.

I forget what I wound up using, but it was an extention that used the NTFS drivers from MS to properly read the disk. You may need to do that for this to work properly.

Posted by bryanspellman on June 02 2005,17:35

Quick Update....

I have a second HD in the computer that passed the diag.....booting from the CDROM, could I cut and paste the files from the bad HD © to my secondary.....

Thanks for all the responses already. The CD-Rom works fine so it should work from there.

Bryan

Posted by cbagger01 on June 04 2005,04:01

Only if you second HD contains a data partition that uses a filesystem format that DSL can write to, like

FAT (MSDOS, Windows95)
FAT32 (Windows 95b, 98, ME)
EXT2, EXT3 (linux)

DSL does not support write access to NTFS (Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP default format) data partitions.

However, you can use the captive.dsl myDSL extension to save data (albeit very slowly) to NTFS drives.

The captive NTFS extension file is not served from the damnsmalllinux.org myDSL repositories, but someone else has the file available on their server. Try searching the forums for keyword:

captive

or

captive.dsl

and search

ALL FORUMS

and FROM THE BEGINNING or NEWER