Knoppix 6.0? LXDE? Cannot open the hard drive?

Hey guys -

I'm pretty Linux illiterate and computer hardware intermediate and software comfortable but I am having some issues...

My Windows XP Professional crashed for god knows what reason telling me it cant find some system or registry hive files, yada yada, so I read and heard about this Knoppix ordeal, cool stuff... except I've yet to get it to fully work for me.

I got past the whole burn the ISO onto a disk and change your boot settings ordeal, used a CD-R, but when it loads Knoppix, it doesnt look like everyone else has been describing, mine says LXDE or something, lightweight desktop environment? Is this normal? I think I have a 6.0 version or some 6.odd version. This may or may not be my problem...

I can see the USB drive just fine using this systems version of the explorer/file manager type program, and what I believe to be the hard drive (are those usually around 70 GB?) but when I click the hard drive, it doesnt load anything and gives me an error message about org.hal.device.error I forget... getting annoying switching computer monitor, mouse, and keyboard back and forth... does this sound familiar to anyone?

I have indeed noticed a couple of people mentioning words like "mount" but I dont know what the heck that is or if it applies in this situation or how I would modify code if that was indeed what comes next...

or Maybe my harddrive is just damaged and I am SOL in getting my files back no matter what?

Any ideas?

If you Google Knoppix 6, or search in this forum, you will find that LXDE is indeed the default environment in Knoppix 6, so you are probably booting quite OK.
For such resque use, in my opinion you really have to know a bit a bit about what you are doing, so I think you should try to read up a bit about basic Unix use. Don't expect people to be very interested in providing answers to basic questions that you should look up yourself.

Resque use is definitely not what the usual GUI file managers are usually built for, and all the different NTFS variants being foreign systems, AFAIK only partially reverse engineered, you should not expect to be able to point and click your way around. This is a basic way you can check if there is a simple way to recover your disk. Open a terminal window (e.g run rxvt) and issue the following commands:

Code:

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su  # become root
fdisk -l  # see what disks and partitions Knoppix has found
mkdir /media/sda1  # maybe you're told this already exists
mount -o ro -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /media/sda1  # mount NTFS partition read-only, give fs type explicitly just to be sure
ls -al /media/sda1    # if mounting has gone well, you can check the main directory listing

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You should not attempt to write to NTFS partitions, but FAT32 goes just fine. So you could use Knoppix to transfer the important contents to a pendrive or a USB harddisk. For more advanced OS repair work, most people would advise you to get the Windows tools available.