Knoppix not showing XP hard drive on laptop

I have a dead Compaq laptop with WinXP SP2 that won't power up or do anything. No lights, nothing. Battery and power supply are good. So I took the hard drive out of that and put it in an older Dell laptop but it wouldn't boot up. So then I used the Knoppix 4.0 CD in the Dell to boot up, but when I get into Knoppix it only shows the CD ROM drive and floppy drive, but no HD. Does this mean the HD is shot? (It shows up in the BIOS).
I have to use "failsafe" to get knoppix to load on the Dell, if that means anything.

If the bios registers the hard drive, I would say there is still a fair chance of being able to recover the data. The only thing is because you had to boot up in"failsafe", many of Knoppix's capabilities are not enabled, so may be that's the problem. Could you try hooking up the drive to another computer instead of the Dell, and run Knoppix from there?

I may be able to try it in another laptop, but this is the only one I have right now. I was thinking that I may be able to get knoppix to boot with some other features enabled but I'm not sure which ones I need or which would work. I figured seeing the hard drive would be a basic function, so after the normal boot failed I went to failsafe without trying anything else.

Ok, in that case, you may want to try the cheat code: knoppix nodma I have seen many notebook problems that needed this.

A good list of cheat codes is found here: http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Cheat_Codes

In the laptops section of this forum you may also find many examples of people who had problems starting Knoppix on their laptops, and what fixes they used to get it working.

Thanks, that did the trick! :D nodma and selecting a different video mode allowed it to see the drive so I know the drive is still working.

Hey, I'm having a similar problem, so I didn't want to start a new thread.

To provide background:

I'm using a live knoppix 5.0 cd and an ibm thinkpad z61t.

The laptop was dropped and was unable to boot from windows. It gets as far as the loading screen, then automatically reboots. It was then taken to my university's computer department to be looked at. While they said there was nothing physically wrong with the hard drive, they opted to replace it (covered under the warranty). They provide a backup service for school data, but not for music and pictures (the later of which are irreplaceable and are the goal for this issue).

Now, because they went in to do the back up, I know it is possible to access files, meaning that the drive is not dead.

I've successfully gotten knoppix to run, however the harddrives don't showed up.
I have tried the codes: nodma, noapic, and noagp... and of course will continue to try all the others in the hard-drive list. But I'm thinking: is there anything else I can do with the program? or even in general?

I know it's recommended to try the hd in another computer, but all I have to work with is another laptop at the moment... and I don't know how easy that would be.

Thank you very much for any help.

~Marco