Help me!

[Infinite Hexamon Nexus]

I am desperately seeking some assistance to rescue my files from my laptop.

Here's the scoop, and forgive me if I'm not providing complete info but I have very little experience with Knoppix and I'm not the smartest person when it comes to computers:

I have a Compaq Presario X1000 laptop which was until recently running Windows XP. Then for some inexplicable reason Windows XP decided it would no longer start up. A friend suggested I use a Knoppix disk he had to see if my files were still intact and they are. Now my problem is how do I get them off my computer before reinstalling Windows XP? My computer doesn't have a CDRW drive although it does have an internal SD drive. The internal SD drive does not seem to work with Knoppix so my 1Gig SD card is useless. I thought I might use my Lyra MP3 player which has a USB connection, but for some reason I can only copy onto a small portion of the space that's on it. I can't figure out why that is. Nor does the SD Card drive on the player work either.

I'm at something of a loss and my budget really doesn't allow me to buy something else right now. Can anyone help me? Is there anyway to make my internal SD drive work? Or to fix my USB drive? Or anyother suggestions???

[bigkahuna]

At the risk of sounding stupid: what's an "SD disk"?

Sounds like you've got to options (I may not be able to give you specific answers but maybe enough for you to search and figure it out):

1. If you've already booted Knoppix and can see your Windoze files, that means you've already "mounted" your Windoze partitions. All you've got left to do is to find some media (external drive or such) that you can mount and copy the Windoze stuff onto.

2. The cause of your problem with XP could be that your MBR has been overwritten or lost. There are ways to recover this (recently Kano @ the Kanotix forum showed me how) from Linux. You might be able to recover this way. Of course, there are alot of other things that may be causing the problem too.

I don't know if I've helped you, good luck!

[tdjokic]

"Secure Digital (SD) memory drive used for transferring or storing files between multiple products such as notebooks, desktops, and select pocket PC's, printers, and digital cameras. Users insert an SD storage card into the digital drive device to customize storage capabilities, while a unique extender cable allows access to hard to reach USB ports." ? (Google is our friend)

[bigkahuna]

... ahhhh... (n00b scratches head as brain absorbs information...) thanks, learned something today ;)

[Markus]

Plug the usb drive in and type dmesg in a console. It should give you a device like sda1 or uba1.
Otherwise you can have it plugged in on bootup and do cat /etc/fstab to see if it was correctly identified.
If you have a line for it in fstab it can be mounted with : sudo mount /mnt/mountpoint_from_fstab
Even if it's not in fstab you can mount it with:
sudo su
mkdir /pen
mount /dev/device_from_dmesg /pen -t vfat