Ok,I'm a PC tech, programmer, and IT Systems Analyst all in one with Linux experience to boot, but I've never had to burn CDs/DVDs with Linux before. The family's main HDD is acting like it's giving up the ghost, sometimes booting and sometimes "System boot disk error". It works sometimes with this Knoppix boot disc, and still not at all when trying to boot the resident Win XP...

My question is what can I use to burn DVDs to make about 200GB of crap? Specifically, what is available on Knoppix? I'm looking, but I don't see anything yet. It's a recent version, but apparently before the release of FireFox 2.0. It's pretty important because this drive has several years of family photos, scans of generations-old slides that may now be lost or damaged, genealogy records, etc. Yeah, I know it should have all been backed up before, but they said "no wait, let us sort through it first".... Never again will Iet anyone tell me that Thanks -Jason

200G?! wow - thats ALOT
and, thats ALOT of burning.
I would say get the replacement drive (I assume you will be getting one?) , and do a disk image, or a direct copy, depending on what the future PC will be doing
I would expect tho, that your data you need to save is under 4G, and will fit on one DVD.
and, have you tried replacing the IDE cable yet? it could just be an intermittant cable

anyways - sorry - no linux help....

Not sure on the burning thing, haven't had to use anything for that under linux myself. Would it be easier just to go to the local store and pick up a second hard drive? Slap that in and start copying. You'd have to create it as a partition linux can write to (ext2, reiserfs, etc), as I believe NTFS is read-only. There's utilities for windows to read various linux file systems, you can find those after you've got the important info copied over.

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialCDBurn.html <- a list of burning software and frontends.

quote Originally posted by Pyrthian: ... I would expect tho, that your data you need to save is under 4G, and will fit on one DVD. ...

The drive is bigger than 200GB, so actually... the data I need to save is close to 200GB! I buy spindles of Taiyo Yuden DVD-Rs, like 100 discs for about $0.41 US each shipped - way cheaper than anything else, and it's 1000x better quality. Where's my spare 250 Terabyte drive....

Put in a 2nd drive just big enough to xfer files asap, Chilled original HDD in a relatively warm freezer (in case it's physically failing) and I'm currently backing up. When it wouldn't boot Windows or mount in Linux, all I could seem to get was the firmware data like the serial #, drive size, etc. so I think the head is failing to park/unpark just like every other drive I've seen fail

Currently waiting while listening to Collective Soul's Seven Year Itch , one of the few CDs I've ever decided was worth paying for. Buy this one (or at least download it) today!

Edit: BTW, NTFS is read-write with this Knoppix disc

[This message has been edited by FieroGT42 (edited 12-19-2006).]

Hook it to a network and ftp the data to a network drive. Thats how I use mine to save data, 200GB is a lot of data but its not out of the question if you have the network storage.

Does your knoppix distro list K3B (also sometimes listed as KIIIB) as a program? This is the default KDE CD/DVD burning software. Usually shown on menu in "system" and "data archiving" etc.

[This message has been edited by tutnkmn (edited 12-19-2006).]