[TriLUG] NT 4.0 backup, knoppix, other ideas?

[Gregory Woodbury]

"It was written once upon a time (by gregbrown at mindspring.com):"
> 
> A good friend has a NT 4.0 machine in bad shape.  It won't load drivers
> and constantly complains about "the security subsystem" not starting.
> I've tried to load LAN drivers for a 3Com PCMCIA card but it doesn't
> work - neither does loading drivers for a 802.11b card from Lucent.
> Reloading the OS from an old NT 4.0 CD doesn't work either (more blah
> blah about the "security subsystem").
> 
> The problem here is he has about 650 megs of data from his MBA program
> he would like to have saved.  Without being able to load any drivers
> for network cards I'm outta luck with a network backup.
> 
> Is there any way to boot Linux from a CD with network drivers and get
> to the data on a NT partition?  I think the partition is NTFS, but I'm
> not sure.  This is the only way I can think to get the data from this
> machine without being able to load drivers and without a CD-RW.
> 
> Has anyone tried booting a Linux distro and getting to NT data?
> Is this even possible?  Does anyone have any other ideas?
> 
> Greg

IIRC, the Knoppix/Debian kernel has the read-only NTFS drivers included
in the mix, so you should be able to read the files and transfer them
with a Knoppix CD.

I've used RH8 plus the third party NTFS kernel module to read NTFS
partitions several times.  I was dual booting NT4 and RH8.

-- 
Gregory G. "Wolfe" Woodbury   `-_-'         Owner/Admin: wolves.durham.nc.us
ggw at wolves.durham.nc.us      U
"The Line Eater is a               Hug your wolf.
 Boojum Snark"