Copy files from one NTFS drive to another via a USB boot disk

Question

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?

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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.

Comments

[Ramhound]

Windows PE boot disk would the best way to do this. Ubuntu also supports NTFS out of the box and support is stable.

[Grant]

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.

[John H]

@TKEyi60 I'm on MiniXP right now and, other than my drive crapping out every now and then, this worked perfectly. As you were the first person to post that suggestion, if you'd like to make it an answer below, I'll accept it. Cheers.

[Synetech]

You said the Windows 7 drive is still available for now, so what about just booting into Windows 7’s System Recovery/Repair?

[Synetech]

@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.

[John H]

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.

[Yass]

No worries, that is completely fair. He did comment first.