I need something basic that will mount NTFS filesystems and USB devices; I just need to move files from a USB drive to the hard drive. I've tried a bunch of them but the few that boot correctly can't mount the filesystems. Any recommendations? I don't need anything beyond the above capabilities, and I have no problem doing it purely through the terminal.

Ubuntu. It'll take a longer time to boot than the fast ones, but it reliably mounts NTFS. Any of the other major ones to it too, methinks.

Any of the current distributions support ntfs-3g which is the current, stable NTFS driver. Some will include it by default. Others require that you install it. In any case, it works very well. I use it all the time to access, fix, recover data on Windows drives.

Thanks for the advice; Ubuntu live does boot up and read the hard drive, but doesn't see the USB drives/mp3 players. I've tried booting with them already plugged in and plugging them in after it's booted and no luck. I've used the mp3 player I'm trying to access with Ubuntu in the past but had no problem.

It won't mount ntfs USB volumes directly. You will need to manually mount them. Do you know how to do that?

Have you tried SLAX? I've used it in the past for data recovery and found it to be a very robust distro.

I'm a fan of parted magic. http://partedmagic.com/

I finally got something semi-working, Ubuntu 8.10 wouldn't recognize any USB drives, but 7.10 will recognize one of them. It won't, however, recognize the one I need to back up. dmesg gives me "device descriptor read/64, error -71" messages, and "device not accepting address 7, error -71"

Try CDlinux, a very special LiveCD since 2001, now newest version is 0.9.1 Full automatically setup and configure, very easy to use. You can also choose install on hard disk or USB drive easily. Mulit-language support. www.cdlinux.info