No Windows, how to copy files from disk to USB?

[ET]

A friend of mine has a computer whose Windows has died because of a virus and his recovery attempts. The disk is probably okay, but I need access to it. My problem is how. It seemed to me that it should not be too difficult to find some free bootable CD that can access an NTFS disk and copy files to a USB disk.

I downloaded quite a few Linux based recovery CDs or Live CDs, but couldn't get any of them to do what I want. They all boast NTFS and USB access, but either the disk doesn't show up, or I can't find a disk manager to show the files, or whatever. It's probably all a trivial matter to a Linux user, who'd just mount something and it'd work, but I don't know Linux.

I saw 911 Rescue CD, which is supposed to create a Windows based boot CD, but its wizard asked me for a Windows 98 CD and wouldn't continue without one.

I've wasted hours on this, and I still can't find anything simple that will do what I want. It seems like such an obvious utility, I can't believe there's nothing that does this. Can anyone here tell me where I can find something that does this?

 

[Atheus]

What about the ultimate boot CD? I think that will do it, but it's a big download.

It would be quicker to do it with Linux though if you already have a liveCD burned. Yea, you will probably need the mount command. Open a console (command window) and do 'cd /mnt' then 'ls' to list the directories. They should be called hd0, hd1, or something similar. If you're lucky, one of these may be your drive - cd into a directory ('cd hd0' for example) and 'ls' to list files. You can do 'cd..' to back up out of the directory you're in. If there's nothing in hd0 or hd1 you will need to mount the drive. Do 'mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hd0' and see what happens. If it works you can cd into the directory /mnt/hd0 and the files will be there.

There are plenty of tutorials online which say pretty much what I just said but in more detail - googling for 'mount ntfs linux' or something will turn up loads of them.

 

[ET]

Thanks. I eventually downloaded Knoppix, which took a long time to download, but does exactly what I want in a very friendly manner. I've tried Knoppix before, around V3, and didn't like it that much, but the current V5 looks really nice.

 

[ET]

Turns out I still needed the help of a Linux expert. For one thing everything was write only, although that was just a UI option to make writable. The more difficult thing was burning a DVD. Without running under root the DVD burner didn't detect things correctly, and caused me much grief. Making it run under root wasn't trivial, either. But all well that ends well, and I managed writing a backup DVD.

Edit: That was of course "read only" (in the second sentence).

 

[dfuze]

You could try removing the drive from his PC, put it in yours as a slave drive, and access the info that way.

Edit: Nevermind. I see that you got it.