i have a dying hardrive on an ibm laptop that i wish to get data off. it has redhat linux on it and will not boot of the hdd.

so i turned to knoppix, made the cd, and booted off the cd. it managed to boot in
knoppix 2

my problem is finding out the proper partition and fixing it.

but every fdisk or fsck command i give returns an i/o error as follows:

for a list of partitions on device hda
>fdisk -l /dev/hda
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0

and fsck partition hda1
>fsck /dev/hda1
fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 4
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 6
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hda1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

i believe the /etc/fstab is incorrect, it follows:

/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/pts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/auto/floppy auto user,noauto,exec,umask-000 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/auto/cdrom auto user, noauto,exec,ro 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ext2 noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda7 /mnt/hda7 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda8 /mnt/hda8 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0

how can knoppix even run without access to a hdd. it must have space, no. where is root mounted?

how can i find out the proper partition and fix the %$$££bugger?