can supergrub help me get to a Windows dual-pane file manager recognizing USB ?

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

Supergrub newbie here, please bear with.  I have a Dell Precision 380 with XP (SP3) that glitched out, the OS startup aborts to a BSOD, by a kdcom.dll , perhaps a video driver that is hard to fix directly.  (This may have been malware as it occurred after a Paltalk session where my anti-virus noticed stuff happening.)

Supergrub is on the system, and boots fine.  However, I am not sure if it has any utilities that really match my direct need.  If it can call a file manager program on a CD (or USB) then it would definitely help.

Later, I will probably try to use my Windows XP CDs to reinstall the XP OS, either a full format or a non-destructive.  (I do have some early images, after the OS was reinstalled about 2-3 years ago, so I may try to go that route if I find that I have to format destruct.  I would not mind that type of clean reinstall anyway, after saving the files.)

First, I would like to copy the files on the disk to a backup drive connected by USB.   BART-PE and/or Win-PE is often used for this, but I know I once did it with a much simpler method using a rescue CD that actually had Free Commander.  There seems to be complications in trying to go with BART-PE or WinPE, although this is supposed to be one of their strengths (late file backup).

I did load a few rescue CDs, UBCD 4 and 5 had a file manager named Volker, (and some others) and the Avast Rescue CD has Midnight Commander.  All quite cryptic, and I would like to use something a little friendlier, Windows-savvy that is easy to copy to the USB drive.   Although if you think one of those is really kewl, share away, I will try.

Can SuperGrub help me here ?  Does it have any direct utilities I missed ?  Or, can it point to a file manager on the CD and run a program ?  If so, any recommendations how to accomplish this ?  Remember, I can boot into all the SuperGrub stuff.

If not SuperGrub, and you have some good ideas, share away.  My immediate goal is simply something I did a few years back, copy the drives to a file-by-file backup before playing with Windows.  A few years ago I did it with FreeCommander, but I did not note what rescue CD had that tool (I even asked on the FC board about this, without response.)

Thanks for any assistance !

Steven Avery

[Steven Avery]

Hi,

I did a bit more checking.  It looks like the Parted Magic PCMan  (which is morphing to SpaceFM) file manager is capable for what I want.  Not a full twin-pane Free Commander style, but savvy enough, and hopefully USB aware.

Another tool that looked pretty good was BootMed, which comes with an unamed file manager in the Explorer fashion.  These two have special write-ups about use for file copying from a Windows puter.

Also I wouldn't mind seeing if MuCommander or Double Commander are sitting natively on any rescue CDs (or if it would be easy to add them to an iso).  All of these look to be better than what I had seen earlier.

In all these cases I would not work through SuperGrub, but boot directly to a rescue CD.

Never did find out which tool once had FreeCommander (I may have done that in older days, PC to PC, not to USB).

Steven

[adrian15]

What you want to do "rescue files from a hard disk to save them into a usb" can be done with most any live cd.

Probably the easiest ones would be parted magic, system rescue cd in X11 mode or maybe better Knoppix or Ubuntu live cd.
Take a look at: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/.

Having a two side pane filemanager is as easy as opening two Nautilus (default filemanager in most Gnu/Linux distributions) windows side by side.

Rescatux will probably have such a feature to save your disk data to an external usb but driven by an easy wizard which will take care of mounting in read-only mode (or fixing it so that you can read it) the internal hard disk and mounting also the external usb disk.

But it's not in TODO list yet.