Problems mounting HDD

[Digitalrover]

Booting from a cd. Any time I try to mount the internal HDD from the system, I get the error:

"Error org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure"

I am not terribly tech proficient, so... baby steps. Sorry.

[Digitalrover]

I'm trying to play around with figuring out how to mount the drive. I'm unfamiliar with... pretty much anything related to linux code. However, from what I can find, most of the commands rely on the HDD being connected via IDE or SCSI connections. My HDD is hooked up to the system via a SATA cable. Should it still be read as an IDE connection or what?

[Capricorny]

I'm trying to play around with figuring out how to mount the drive. I'm unfamiliar with... pretty much anything related to linux code. However, from what I can find, most of the commands rely on the HDD being connected via IDE or SCSI connections. My HDD is hooked up to the system via a SATA cable. Should it still be read as an IDE connection or what?

What exactly are you doing? You must be more precise about what you have tried to do if you want people to help you.

To find out about the disk(s), open a terminal, issue su to become root. and check what Knoppix has found by

fdisk -l

.
Now you will probably find the SATA harddisk partitions as /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 etc - or /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1 etc.... If the first partition is /dev/sda1, you can try to mount it, read-only:

mkdir /media/sda1
mount -o ro /dev/sda1 /media/sda1

Be careful when mounting with write privileges. You can mess things up, NTFS partitions in particular. Check out the man pages:

man mount

And with Knoppix, you don't really have to touch the harddisks at all if you don't want to.

[ckamin]

Why are you trying to mount the drive? Is it because Windows no longer boots, or are you just trying out Linux? If the drive is corrupted, I'd suggest using the tools that Window$ provides to repair it, rather than risk something like writing to the drive with a non-Window$ OS. There is a decent recovery tool for Vista provided by Micro$oft on the install disk, or by download. The error message may be a clue, but I'm not going to try to decipher it without more information. It could just be that the Chipset/SATA controller are not supported by the version of Linux you are running. Some of Intel chipsets have been troublesome with some versions of Linux. Trying a later version of Linux might be the cure in that case.

Writing to an NTFS Window$ partition with Linux is risky. I have seen NTFS partitions corrupted by doing that, so I would not suggest trying it, especially if you are a beginner.

If you are just experimenting with Linux, then leave your Window$ partitions alone until you get a feel for it.

When you find yourself in a deep hole, first thing to do is stop digging.