KNOPPIX to backup an unbootable Windows machine

josh_at_thesouthbeachhostel.com
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: 26 Feb 2005 18:27:13 -0800

Hi,

My Toshiba laptop won't boot into Windows anymore. One thing I am
trying to do is repair it with Knoppix. Bear with me, I am going to
explain some of the Windows and then my (so far) unsuccessful attempts
to copy my files to a different hard drive with Knoppix. I can't write
to my new external hard drive.

When I try to boot Windows I get a black screen with the message:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt \windows\system32\config\system"

So I went online and found lots of information about how to fix it such
as http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/en-us. I followed all the
directions but it didn't work. The main point of what they said was to
copy the following:
copy C:\windows\repair\system C:\windows\system32\config\system.

That didn't work because it said the file doesn't exist in my repair
directory (I don't know why).

I had a spare disk of Knoppix laying around so I was using that in the
meantime to connect to the Internet. I noticed that I could see all of
my Windows files on the hard drive and even open most of them. So I
was pretty impressed and went out and bought a book called Knoppix
Hacks, and also SAMS Fedora 3 Unleashed. I also bought a Seagate 120 GB
internal desktop drive and a case with USB cable so I could connect it
to my laptop and other computers and run Fedora 3 from that.

One thing I noticed about this drive is that when I turn the power on,
even if it isn't connected to a computer, it spins constantly. I don't
know if that is normal or not.

I first connected this drive to a Windows desktop and formatted it with
4 primary partitions -- one as NTFS and three as FAT32. I wrote a text
file to the drive from the Windows machine to see if everything was ok.

Then I connected my drive to my laptop and booted from my Knoppix CD.
I tried to copy files from my laptop hard drive to the external hard
drive but it wouldn't let me create a new directory on the partition (I
had already mounted the external FAT32 partition and unchecked the box
in properties that said "read only"). I also tried making a quick text
document with the Kate editor and tried to save it to a mounted FAT32
partition on the new external drive but it wouldn't write to that
drive.

Am I doing something wrong? Sorry for the long explanation but I
thought that maybe someone could pick out some clues from the story as
to what is going on.

Also, is there a way to run Outlook 2003 with wine? I need to get my
email out of Outlook before I reformat my internal hard drive. I don't
know where that program is storing my email and calendar.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone might be able to provide.

Josh

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