Re: Accessing NTFS drive by mounting on another machine

From: Malke (malke_at_nospoonnotreally.com)
Date: 10/20/04 

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 06:31:53 -0700

Philip Herlihy wrote:

> A scenario: Machine A has a horrid virus and we want to salvage the
> data from the disk.
>
> We take the NTFS drive out of A and mount it (eg external USB housing
> or adapter) on another machine B, hoping to get access to the data
> without running any of the malware that would start if the disk was
> being used to boot.
>
> However, NTFS file permissions prevent access to the disk when mounted
> in
> machine B. Any way round this?
>
> I'd guess that if A and B are in the same domain then a user of A
> could log on to B and access the disk "legally" but in most cases the
> machines will be
> unrelated. Is there any way to get to the data? Maybe one answer is
> to create another partition (if there's space) using BootitNG or
> Partition Magic, install a second copy of Windows and boot from that
> as Administrator. Comments welcome.
>

The easiest (and safest) way to get the data is to use Knoppix, a Linux
distro that runs from cd. If the sick computer has two cd drives, one
of which is a burner, you don't need to move the hard drive. If the
machine doesn't have 2 cd drives, slave the hard drive in a machine
that does. Boot with Knoppix and use k3b to copy all your data to cd-r
(or dvd-r if there is a ton of data and the target machine will be able
to read dvd's).

Get the .iso for Knoppix at www.knoppix.net. You will need a fast
Internet connection (or look for a BitTorrent stream), a cd burner, and
third-party burning software to burn the .iso.

Malke 

-- 
MS MVP - Windows Shell/User
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"

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