Hard drive rescue help

[hairofthedog]

Hi,

About a month ago, stupid as I am, I got somewhat irritated on my laptop and gave the keyboard a gentle smash. 30 seconds later Windows 7 gave me the blue screen, and since then no OS can be found when trying to boot. I'm quite broke (and probably will be for some time) and would as far as I can prefer to check out the possibilities of rescuing the most important files myself, rather than paying for someone other to do it for me.

I have been able to boot from a usb-stick, testing several open source OSs. (Hope that means the damage is limited to the internal hard drive.) But, since I'm completely new to this non-windows stuff I still haven't had any success in trying to access my hard drive, mainly because all the commands are all like hebrew to me.

Just found out about Knoppix and decided to try it. I'm running the File Manager, but it only shows to drives: pendrive and knoppix_fs. No c:\. Does this means I won't be able to use Knoppix to rescue any files? (I can add that the machine emits some sort of asthmatic humming sound while trying to boot from the hard drive. Guess that should be taken as a bad omen. An acquaintance told me this might not necessarily mean it's all over, so I'm still giving it my best try.)

Thankful for every help I can get!

Regards,

Jens

[Forester]

While Knoppix can be used as a rescue disk it isn't designed to do just that so you may not find it as tolerant of newbies as you might want. Have a look at:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/threads...-using-Knoppix

The guy asking the questions claimed to be a System Administrator so it might be a bit advanced for you. I've not read the thread. Anyway. give it a read before you give up.

[OErjan]

uhm, first what version of knopix?

second, have you tried checking the /media/ directory? there might be something under there called sda1 or hda1(sd= scsi or Sata hd=ata) possibly sdb1 or hdb1 (a=first disk b=second d=third...) or some other number, depending on how manu partitions you have.
by the way in this regard "disk" is also SD-card, pendrive, CD, DVD or other readable media.

third, do you see any error messages during boot?

fourth, what does the comman fdisk -l (lower case L)(type in a terminal window) say, that is type

 fdisk -l

and hit enter, terminal can be called xterm aterm, Konsole and several other things.

keep asking