[conspire] best Knoppix-like (read: live CD) distro for NTFS read/write?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Eric De Mund (ead-conspire at ixian.com):

> Good People,

Leaves me out.  ;->

> What's the most reliable live CD/DVD Linux distribution a la Knoppix for
> NTFS reads and writes? 

Strictly speaking, like "What's the best [foo]" questions generally, this
posits someone having evaluated all candidates, which is perhaps a bit
unlikely.  

Anyway, maybe what you want is a live CD with the ntfs-3g driver
(beta), a temporary fork of, and improvement upon, ntfsmount, offering
for the first time really good write-mode support:
http://wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfs-3g

I gather from that page that you can get the indicated driver with
recent versions of several live-CD distros, including Puppy Linux,
Kanotix, and GParted Live CD.  

> I want to cut a CD/DVD for a friend who lives
> hundreds of miles away and who uses Windows XP Professional. As you all
> know, Windows sometimes gets its knickers in a serious twist, and I want
> her to be able to have a reliable way to access her hard disk even if
> Windows won't boot.
>
> I've already set her system up so that she can boot into the Recovery
> Console, and I've already supplied her with Winternals' Administrator's
> Pak, yet I'd also like a solution for accessing the Windows disks (read:
> NTFS partitions) quickly in order to pull files off of them and put them
> on a USB thumb drive.

Eh, for just _read_ access, any live CD with an NTFS driver will do fine.
That's not been a challenge for a long time.  There are no safety issues
for merely _reading_ files off NTFS.