richpodraza

I have a somewhat unique scenario...I just recently built a new computer and put in it 2 hard drives, one is a brand new HD that I did a clean install of Windows Server 2003 on, it is the C drive and what I want to use as my main drive. The other is my old HD, with an old install of winXP along with many many gigs of my files, documents and music, etc.

When I boot up into Windows Server and use the explorer to try to access D:\Docs and Settings\Rich Podraza\ it gives an error message saying access is denied. I think this is because I had a password on that account and my personal files were protected from other users, using the windows settings to do so.

So, I tried to get to that account by booting from the old hard drive, but I am having problems booting with that hard drive. It prompts me for safe mode, and regardless of what option I choose my computer just reboots right after. It seems to me like the windows installation is corrupted somehow, but the file structure is still intact. I can access and open any other files off that HD, just not the ones in my old documents folder (which is most of them).

After all that, I am trying to use knoppix to somehow copy these files from one HD to another. I don't know anything about whether or not I need to mount these hard drives in some special way or configure knoppix to be ntfs compatible...all I know is that when I booted knoppix with the default settings, it kept giving me a read or write error when I tried to copy files from one of the HD's to another. I could open them as hda and hdb and examine the files, but couldnt copy them. Can anyone please help me? Thanks!

batty_professor

I'm not certain that Knoppix will handle NTFS system files, but you may find this http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html useful. It promises NTFS support, and a host of file recovery utilities, all on a 50MB live CD.