I had a customer whose Dell was hit by lightening. He knew he would have to purchase a new os (Thank you, microsoft) But he wanted to recover data from the hard drive. The only parts that were bad were the motherboard and the power supply, so a new case and a new board got him back into a computer. But, neither knoppix nor Mepis would copy the data from an ntfs partition to a usb backup drive I keep for the purpose. Changing permissions did nothing, and I was afraid it was the ntfs/linux issue. But, upon researching the net, gparted claimed to be able to handle the job. I found a bootable gpsrted iso, burned and, wow, it worked!

Now I have yet another disk for my tool chest, a gparted boot disk.

FYI the last version of Slax, issued a couple of days ago, has both gparted AND the 3g-ntfs read/write driver. It's (IMHO) the best Linux liveCD available, because ( a ) it works either from CLI or X, ( b ) because it's very easily customizable to your needs by simple means (adding/removing prebuilt modules), and ( c ) because it can be installed and booted from a pendrive with just a few mouse clicks.

Definitely confirmed: SLAX is great, and the module concept is simply marvellous and double precious using USB flash drives/memory sticks: Just throw the *.mo files you need in the /modules dir and the soft is ready after next boot. Maybe this is the future of installing apps 'n stuff? Plus, you can use software modules off the web (using livemod). How cool is this?


I've made a working device by this method:


1) Load the slax popcorn edition iso to harddisk.

2) Loop-mount the image to get access to the file structure.

3) Copy all content to a tmp dir for working purpose.

4) Throw in all desired modules.

5) Create a filesystem and format with reiserfs (why stick to DOS16?)

6) Copy content from tmp dir to usb-stick

7) Use lilo to install a bootloader into it's MBR.


I could have stuck to the "normal" SLAX method, but wanted to be able to access a system by standard means. As in most cases this resides on /dev/hda1, I've integrated the option in lilo. Surely this still can be improved.

(Ever wanted to show your friends what xgl/compiz can do to their bloated gaming hardware? Okay, you'll need additional stuff, but the very module is less than 15 MB ;-)


More details on request, additional info can be found here:

http://www.slax.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7094


Greetings,

scoonma


P.S. As Mandriva derives from RedHat which derives from Slackware, I wonder about few... :-)