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Re: Need a Live CD that can access NTFS hard drives
de Terry 04/12/2006 02:53
On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:11:38 -0600, Anonymous <noemail@noisp.com>
wrote:
>My computer's hard drive is formatted in NTFS. Of all of the Linux
>distros that I've tried, Ubuntu is the only Live CD that has ever been
>able to boot my computer.
Why is that? What is so weird about your PC. Most live CD's can boot
almost anything. They may not support your network card, or your sound
card, or whatever, but not being able to boot at all? Weird.
>But Ubuntu won't mount, read or access my NTFS hard drive.
It should be able to. Most linux distros can read NTFS partitions. If
the linux distro boots, and you're using IDE hard drives, it's pretty
hard to believe current versions of linux distros can't read an NTFS
partition.
Why you think it won't mount? How have you been mounting it? What
happens when you try? Have you asked about this in the ubuntu forum?
>I want a Live CD that can boot my machine, provide some kind of an
>operating system, and allow me to access the NTFS hard drive.
I do this all the time with System Rescue CD.
http://www.sysresccd.org. This is a small linux recovery and
maintenance CD, based on gentoo linux, which supports lots of
hardware, so it's likely it will boot on your system. If not, they
have a forum that will help.
>-*- The OS used by the Live CD doesn't matter. It can be Linux,
>Windows, BeOS...anything as long as it can mount, read and access an
>NTFS hard drive.
What do you mean by "access"?
The "normal" NTFS drivers in linux distros can read NTFS partitions --
see the file system, and read the files on it. They are not, however,
up to writing to the drive. Technically, they can write to files as
long as they are just overwriting data, but they can't write new
files, or add to files, or delete files, so they are pretty much
limited to reading.
If you need to write to NTFS partitions, you will need to mount the
"captive" drivers. These drivers provide a link between the linux
system and Windows 2K or XP NTFS drivers. You copy a couple of files
from your 2K system to your linux distribution, and linux uses the
actual windows code to access the NTFS partition. That means it's safe
and reliable, it's just a little slow. Nothing noticeable in normal
use, but if you're copying, say, 5 GB to an NTFS partition, the
slowdown will be quite noticeable.
The captive drivers are what "wine" uses for accessing NTFS partitions
(in fact it was developed for the wine system, I believe), so it's had
lots of testing.
I suggest you lurk in some linux newsgroups, or the forum for the
linux distro you are trying to get working. They will be able to help
more that ACF people, who aren't, in general, linux experts. :-)
Terry