Gentlemen,
You are making this thing to hard.  Make you a CD copy (iso) of Puppy
Linux.  Boot off of it and you should see your internal or external
drives at the bottom of the screen.  Click on the drive and read the
contents.  I copy the contents of drives to external usb drives
formatted to NTFS all the time.  Puppy is your friend to diagnose
hardware/software problems.  Great little OS to carry on that thumb
drive in your pocket.....just like a Swiss Army knife. Hope this helps.

Jim Brewer

I'll have to try that just to further my Linux education.
I have installed half a dozen different Linux distros recently looking
for the one I like the best.

So far Mint with Mate wins if it don't crash :) It does everything including
running Cannon movies with a rare codec out of the box.

CentOS seems to be the most stable but it does not do a lot of
things like codecs, file type support and wireless module support.
I have it reading and writing NTFS however and I am using it hardwired to
the cable modem.

Paul Lamar

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