cant find hard drive. access denied. cant open

[ed123]

I have a M55 toshiba satelitte laptop. I know nothing about computers. I know that when i started my computer up the other day i got a message after it went through the bios that said disk read error "ctrl,alt,delete to restart" after a million attempts of this nothing worked. I ran across knoppix and painfully have been trying to figure out how to even use it on my laptop. I finally did that. now i can get on knoppix and i dont see anywhere where my harddrive would be. I have plugged in an external drive hoping it would be as simple as drag and drop files. Of course its not going to be for me. My luck!!! So i finally figured out where the knoppix command prompt is and was able to type in some various things i have seen off this knoppix site. i have gotten cant open or permission denied. What i am looking for is someone to help me through a step by step process. I am a very honest person and someone that can walk me through this i will be willing to give them some money. Please help. I need these files and i know nothing about computers in this manner. Look at this as a challenge. Thanks and Please.

[Harry Kuhman]

I have a M55 toshiba satelitte laptop. I know nothing about computers. I know that when i started my computer up the other day i got a message after it went through the bios that said disk read error "ctrl,alt,delete to restart" after a million attempts of this nothing worked. I ran across knoppix and painfully have been trying to figure out how to even use it on my laptop. I finally did that. now i can get on knoppix and i dont see anywhere where my harddrive would be. I have plugged in an external drive hoping it would be as simple as drag and drop files. Of course its not going to be for me. My luck!!! So i finally figured out where the knoppix command prompt is and was able to type in some various things i have seen off this knoppix site. i have gotten cant open or permission denied. What i am looking for is someone to help me through a step by step process. I am a very honest person and someone that can walk me through this i will be willing to give them some money. Please help. I need these files and i know nothing about computers in this manner. Look at this as a challenge. Thanks and Please.

First of all, understand that Linux and Knoppix are no substitute for good backups. It could well be that you hard disk has died. It may not even be spinning, or if it is spinning there are plenty of other problems that could keep the data from being read properly. Also, even if the drive is physically good, Windows will often self destruct it's own data (or less often a virus or trojan); we see plenty of new Knoppix users show up here for this exact same reason. In some cases Knoppix can indeed read a disc that Windows can not, or can be used to recover a partition table, but in other cases it can not. I don't always have good current backups either, but if I don't have good backups of files that I claim are "important", I don't expect anyone to give of their time to work miracles.

That said, if Knoppix can recognize partitions on your disk you should have little icons on your desktop with names similar to hda1, sda1 or hda5. Do you see icons like this?

If you don't have partition icons, your partition table might be bad (or, as I said, the drive might be dead). There are two utilities in Knoppix that people have used to recover partition tables. these are gpart and testdisk. You should be able to bring up a console (Linux term for what Windows calls a DOS prompt) and type man gpart or man testdisk and read about these, or just use Google to find information about them on the web.

I don't know what type of disk a M55 uses or how many partitions you have/had on that drive. If it's an IDE style drive then the first partition should be had1; if it's a newer SATA drive then look for sda1; the drives istself will be refered to as either hda or sda respectively.

If your external drive is formatted with a FAT partition then, if you can find the files you want you should be able to drag and drp them to the external drive (you need to understand how to make the external drive writeable, it might not be by default). Some people bvelieve that Knoppix can now safely write to NTFS partition also. I am not one of those people and if your external drive is NTFS formatted then I would advise against any drag and drop operation to it (unless you don't care about anything on the drive or the files that you are trying to recover). There are other ways to recover the files, including backups to a FAT formatted flash drive or a transfer across a local network. If you do transfer any files to an attached drive, it6 is very important to understand that you need to either shut down Knoppix or explicitky unmount the drive before detaching it.

I have a M55 toshiba satelitte laptop. I know nothing about computers.....

You know, it's pretty hard to remotely give someone advice on how to deal with technical problems when they start the discussion like this. Almost anything said could either be taken as condescending or overly technical depending on what you really do know. You might be better served by finding a technical friend to help you. WARNING: You are extremely unlikely to be well served by the likes of the hired technical schmucks like Best Buy's "Geek Squad", who seem to have a well deserved reputation for declaring hardware destroyed and data lost even if it wasn't before they got their hands on it.

[Harry Kuhman]

Posting the same message over and ober again is considered very poor form and often referred to as spamming the forums. You posted this same message 4 times, including two posts in this same section. Imagine how cluttered these forums would become if everyone who had a problem that was important to them decided that they could or should repeatedly post it, not to mention how hard it would make it to follow any discussion across multiple threads. You other posts have been removed.