Hard Drive Problem

[BigGov]

My roommates' laptop is having problems right now. His hard drive has seemed to has died and when he tries booting up to Windows it says there is a disk-read error and doesn't load. He would really like to save the data if at all possible and I had remembered Knoppix, which I downloaded and burned to a CD on my laptop. He tried running it and it will load, the only problem is he cannot see his full hard drive when he loads Knoppix.

His laptop is a standard Gateway 450 series, has the one 30 GB hard drive, and ran Windows XP Home.

Is there something my roommate has to do before he'd be able to see his entire hard drive, or is he just fucked?

Thanks for any help.

[Harry Kuhman]

....he cannot see his full hard drive when he loads Knoppix.
......

I don't know all the answers, but I can at least start with a couple of the right questions:
You say he cannot see his full hard drive. What can he see? Are there multiple partitions and he only sees some of them? Is there one partition and he can see some files but not all? Do you get an error when you mount the hard drive? Did you even mount the drive?

If Xp is messed up but the partition(s) are good then Knoppix may help you recover the data. If the partition(s) are bad then saving stuff may be more of a problem (not out of the question, but could well be harder). People will need more accurate information on what is really going wrong with the disk.

Also, have you tried any other recovery software? Spinrite comes to mind, although there are a number of tools that might be of help here.