Knoppix solves NTFS partition woes

Is it possible to write to an NTFS partition after booting a PC with a Linux boot disk? I have a PC with a corrupt ntldr file on the C: drive that won’t boot into Windows. I started the machine with a Knoppix Linux disk and I can read the partition but I can’t replace the file. Is there another utility that will allow writing to the NTFS partition?

Knoppix used to use the Captive NTFS driver, and that could write files to NTFS partitions. It was removed from newer versions when the Captive project stopped being maintained. If you have or can get a version of Knoppix from the 3.4 to 3.7 version range you may be able to simply use that. Newer implementations of NTFS drivers are available for Linux; NTFS-3G and Linux-NTFS are two examples. Downloading the drivers and creating a boot CD just to copy a file onto your Windows machine may be more work than you want to tackle. There is a commercial offering from Paragon that comes in personal and professional versions that provides the functionality to write to NTFS disks from a Linux boot CD. You can download a trial-version CD image that can be burned to disk and used to verify that the product will do what you need it to do. The personal edition is priced reasonably, and the professional edition contains a number of features useful for maintaining systems in enterprise environments. The trial CD is functional enough that you can create and/or copy files to an NTFS partition after booting to the CD.

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Is it possible to write to an NTFS partition after booting a PC with a Linux boot disk? I have a PC with a corrupt ntldr file on the C: drive that won’t boot into Windows. I started the machine with a Knoppix Linux disk and I can read the partition but I can’t replace the file. Is there another utility that will allow writing to the NTFS partition?

Knoppix used to use the Captive NTFS driver, and that could write files to NTFS partitions. It was removed from newer versions when the Captive project stopped being maintained. If you have or can get a version of Knoppix from the 3.4 to 3.7 version range you may be able to simply use that. Newer implementations of NTFS drivers are available for Linux; NTFS-3G and Linux-NTFS are two examples. Downloading the drivers and creating a boot CD just to copy a file onto your Windows machine may be more work than you want to tackle. There is a commercial offering from Paragon that comes in personal and professional versions that provides the functionality to write to NTFS disks from a Linux boot CD. You can download a trial-version CD image that can be burned to disk and used to verify that the product will do what you need it to do. The personal edition is priced reasonably, and the professional edition contains a number of features useful for maintaining systems in enterprise environments. The trial CD is functional enough that you can create and/or copy files to an NTFS partition after booting to the CD.

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