Knanks in advance...

June 1, 2006 12:04 PM

Knoppix won't let me delete or move files [MI]

After having some hard drive issues, it got to the point where windows wouldn't load on start-up. So I burned a Knoppix CD to get access to the files on the drive. Worked like a charm -- hooray!

However, when running Knoppix on my broken PC, I can only copy or transfer files. I can't move any files around or delete them. What gives?

posted by Heminator to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I'm guessing you made your files private from within Windows, and you are using an NTFS partition for Windows. If so, there's nothing you can do without very expensive software.
posted by oaf at 12:14 PM on June 1, 2006

My recollection is that Knoppix mounts existing drives read-only. You should be able to right click the icon on the desktop and remount it R/W.
posted by mzurer at 12:17 PM on June 1, 2006

Sounds like you have ntfs mounted as read-only.

man ntfsmount

I used ntfstools on Trinity Rescue Kit to retrieve about a gig of accidently deleted files from a WinXP box last weekend.
posted by sonofsamiam at 12:17 PM on June 1, 2006

I had the same problem earlier this week and just couldn't get Knoppix to R/W the NTFS partition.

I ended up going here, http://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm. The NTFS for DOS software referenced is what I ended up using. You need to follow the prompts precisely about pressing Y instead of typing Yes at one point or it won't work. Also, I ended up paying the guy the US$4 for all of his utilities since I had spent several hours at that point trying to rename a file that was preventing booting. I know that probably makes me a rube, but I was able to download and burn an image that allowed me to fix the problem very quickly.

I wish I had searched further - that trinity rescue kit sounds pretty sweet.
posted by sciatica at 12:28 PM on June 1, 2006

Unless the behavior has changed in more recent versions, mzurer is right in that Knoppix initially mounts hard drives read only. Since you can see the files and copy them, I bet the problem is not that they're private, as oaf postulated.

I found this in the Knoppix FAQ:

Q: I see the partitions from my hard disk on the desktop and can access their contents when I click on them, but if I try to write to them I always get the error message "access denied". How can I write to my existing partitions?

A: The general philosophy of KNOPPIX is to allow as little write access as possible. For this reason, existing partitions are either not mounted or only mounted "read only". If you click with your right mouse button on an icon, the "read-only" attribute under item "device" can be un-checked.
After this, the partition can be mounted "read-write" (for already mounted partitions, first click on "unmount"!). CAUTION: writing to NTFS partitions can lead to data loss, since Linux does not really support this file system! However, DOS and FAT32 file systems are safe for write access.

Tip:
In the shell the command "mount -o remount,rw /mnt/" can allow already-mounted file systems to be "made writeable".

posted by Godbert at 12:29 PM on June 1, 2006

I never had a problem making partitions writable, and I just followed the directions in Knowing Knoppix.
posted by billtron at 12:31 PM on June 1, 2006

I've used captive with some amount of success with Inside Security's INSERT rescue CD to write to NTFS. Captive uses Windows' native binary driver files to access the NTFS filesystem.
I would recommend this for emergency use only. It is very slow, quite cumbersome, and likely to eat your filesystem whole.
posted by leapfrog at 1:26 PM on June 2, 2006