Ubuntu live disc and ntfs drives?

mooni

mooni

mooni

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Joined
8 Aug 2005
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26
Hello everyone,
I`ll get straight to the problem.
I am trying to recover a friend`s personal files ( pictures etc) from her computer (corrupt Windows XP). I booted into the Ubuntu live disc no problem, and mounted the two partitions ( both NTFS), with the plan to copy her personal files to the second partition and use the restore disk (its a computer / TV setup otherwise i wouldn`t use the restore disk), but the mounted drives were read only. My understanding is that Ubuntu doesn`t support writeable NTFS drives to begin with.

My question, (abit of a Linux newbie).
How can i make the NTFS drives rewriteable from within the live CD?
Is it possible to install the NTFS Config tool using only the live CD, or is there another way?

Thanks for your help.
P.
(currently looking through the Ubuntu forums for a solution)
 
If your search is fruitless you might consider another strategy. You could format the second partition to ext3 using gparted, then transfer the files from the NTFS partition to it. You'd then reinstall Windows and install ext2fs. Next you'd copy the data back onto the original partition. Finally you'd format the etx3 partition back to NTFS.

It's a bit more complicated but at least you won't be using any experimental file system writing methods.
 
I'm sure the Fedora 8 LiveCD I gave my dad to try on his laptop allowed NTFS writing, if you want to use one of those instead?
 
Hi,
Thanks for your replies.
I think there is already some files on the second partition, it would be a lot of hassle to save the files to cd, and convert the partition etc etc ... It would be easier just to put all her pictures etc directly onto a cd to begin with.
I was checking into a few other live cd distros, apparently the lastest ubuntu cd has ntfs support (7.10), i was using 7.04. I am also downloading trinity rescue kit (http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12), as a backup.

fingers crossed.
 
anything with ntfs-3g (for example puppy linux) the standard kernel has ntfs read support, but not write (well - technically it does, but practically it doesn't).
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/<whatever> /<wherever_you_want_to_mount_it>
voila you can read and write to your ntfs partition.
 
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