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I have 2 NTFS drives, and the one with my Windows 7 installation on it has died today. The drive is definitely on the way out but, after using a USB boot disk, I was able to see that the data is intact.

My second NTFS drive also has data on it that I want to keep but, luckily, it's much larger than the bad drive, so I'd like to find a way to copy the bad drive to the good one.

The problem is this: I've been unable to find a USB boot disk (Rufus, UBCD, etc.), or utility, that supports NTFS read/write operations - the ones I've found (I don't remember the names as there were multiple utilities that came with the boot disks) only seem to support read operations.

Are there any free tools I can use that will allow me to copy all of the files from the first drive, to the second, without losing anything on either drive?

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    Windows PE boot disk would the best way to do this. Ubuntu also supports NTFS out of the box and support is stable.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 3, 2013 at 17:41
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    I'd put Hiren's BootCD in, and boot from MiniXP at the DOS screen. This gives you a Windows environment which plays nice with NTFS.
    – Grant
    Commented Sep 3, 2013 at 17:51
  • @Ramhound Good shout with Ubuntu. Windows PE seemed like a lot of work for the same thing. I did go with the suggestion of Hiren's BootCD in the end, simply because I already had grub4DOS setup on my USB drive. Thanks a lot, though.
    – John H
    Commented Sep 3, 2013 at 20:51
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    You said the Windows 7 drive is still available for now, so what about just booting into Windows 7’s System Recovery/Repair?
    – Synetech
    Commented Sep 4, 2013 at 2:49
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    @JohnH, ah okay. Could you have configured your BIOS (or used a BIOS boot-time hotkey) to select the W7 drive as the boot device? Then you could have booted to the repair mode.
    – Synetech
    Commented Sep 4, 2013 at 14:08

2 Answers 2

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I appreciate that @John H!

I'd put Hiren's BootCD in, and boot from MiniXP at the DOS screen. This gives you a Windows environment which plays nice with NTFS.

I'm glad this worked out for you.

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Have you tried Hiren's Boot CD? You could make another bootable USB stick or a bootable CD-ROM. You could boot into Mini Windows XP using Hiren's Boot CD and use one of the provided Recovery applications (DiskGenius is what I use) to check if you can copy the contents from one drive to another.

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  • Thanks for the answer. This has worked for me, although I'm using MiniXP and not DiskGenius. However, if TKEyi60 posts his/her answer, I'll accept that instead as he/she posted first. Thank you, all the same.
    – John H
    Commented Sep 3, 2013 at 20:54
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    No worries, that is completely fair. He did comment first.
    – Yass
    Commented Sep 3, 2013 at 20:57

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