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?