strange boot error - i'm a linux noob

Ok.. last night I was just playing a game as usual and my system froze. I powered off/on and got the following message (by the way I was in windows xp)
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\Windows\system32\config\system
You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows setup using the original setup CD-Rom. Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair."

My friend lent me a winxp bootable cd and I put it in, but it would not detect my harddrive so i could not repair or install a fresh copy.

The drive is a SATA 250gb Western Digital. The reason I am in this forum is because someone told me about knoppix and that I could fix my problem using this. So I got a copy of 3.7 and am looking at it now on the desktop. It has my 2 cdroms and floppy, but not my hard drive. How do I get Knoppix to detect my harddrive and how the heck do I fix this problem? I can't lose the data on that disk (I am fearing that the drive is corrupt) it is so important to me to get this fixed. I appreciate any help you may offer.

I don't think that a knoppix-CD is the right thing to backup or repair your data.
Try to get a CD booting to Windows PE, there was a CD in one of the CT-magazines (germany).
I have had such a problem some month ago and was able to copy all my data to an usb-drive. But i must be true and say that i had got a recovery-cd with repair-programs like ontrack and so on, and this rescued almost anything. My prob was the installation of ubuntu which caused the windows-disk to be unusable. But i did never get the system to be repairable by windows, i had to format and install windows again, but lost no data.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by GoDofUSA

How do I get Knoppix to detect my harddrive and how the heck do I fix this problem? I can't lose the data on that disk (I am fearing that the drive is corrupt) it is so important to me to get this fixed. I appreciate any help you may offer.

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No one worth their salt is going to help restore critical data via an on-line forum, espcially if you are a complete neophyte to Linux. It's just too big a risk to their own reputation. If you had a back up or if losing the data wasn't such a big concern, that would be a different story. But as it is, I'd recommend that you hire a computer professional to physically examine your machine and recommend a course of action.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org

I'll throw my 2 cents worth in here too.

I can't lose the data on that disk is so vague and uninformative that I laughed about it when I read it. MAybe it means the data is vitally important and I can't lose it, as long as I don't have to pay anyone or do much work myself. Sure, maybe it is important enough that a professional recovery service may be of use, but many times such services and not worth it. And I've heard of times that some small time "professional" operator gets a disk and then suddenly the price goes up for that data recovery, ten times or more of what was originally stated, supposedly because of the extra work he had to do to recover the data. It strikes me as nothing more than extortion. They have you disk, they may have your data, they know you are despirate, and now they will try to bleed you. Even if you manage to find an honest individual or company (and realize that you can't trust on-line references), there may still be a time sensitive nature to the data. If you are an author, for example, and your publisher's deadline is next Monday, sending a disk for data recovery and getting the data back in three or four weeks may do you no good at all.

The important thing to realize here is that this all happened under Windows. In addition to the fact that hard drives do sometimes fail, it is well know that Windows will frequently get into modes where it refuses to boot and the only "fix" seems to be to load the original software from the original disks and start again. In this case, where the noob said he or she had to borrow a XP disk, I even wonder why the noob doesn't have an original copy, but it's apparent that the noob hasn't considered the data important enough to make a backup, even to a simple and cheap USB flash device. Therefor, in spite of what was claimed, the data is not important. If it was important it would have been backed up. QED.

No one else seems to want to mention this so I will, 3.7 is too old to support an SATA drive. I've seen people talking about support issues with 3.9 and even 4.0.1 DVD and I'm not clear how well suported this drive (and more importantly it's interface) are by newer versions of Knoppix, but software that predates the hardware isn't going to have driver support in it.

the only reason i didn't have the disk is bc im at my dorm and left the xp cd at my house, just to clarify. turns out i need sata drivers for the windows cd to work and then HOPEFULLY il get into the command prompt and re copy the files necessary (it's a registry screw up it turns out). and yes the data is vitally important to me

ok i got the latest knoppix and it found my hard drive. im curious if i can burn the files i want to save to dvd without them screwing up when transfering. i dont know how linux operates in regard to pc files lol

Quote:

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Originally Posted by GoDofUSA

ok i got the latest knoppix and it found my hard drive. im curious if i can burn the files i want to save to dvd without them screwing up when transfering. i dont know how linux operates in regard to pc files lol

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Not sure what you think the latest Knoppix is. If you have multiple optical drives and can boot from one and burn to the other, maybe, but there are some bugs in the real newest DVD version that affect burning (follow the Documentation link near the top of this page and read the BUGS section for details and the fix). If you have the real newest version, the DVD version, then you likely can't use the toram cheat code, but if you have 3.9 the CD version then if you have a meg of memory then you could use the toram cheat code to free up the CD drive. Otherwise the CD needs to stay in the drive (you booted from CD, remember). Knoppix does not write to your disk unless you tell it to. And whatever you do, do not try to write to your NTFS partitions to fix this, you will likely destroy the partition. Knoppix can read files from a PC partition just fine. It can write to a FAT partition. But MS seems to be doing it's best to make sure that Linux can't safely write to an NTFS partition. The most common use of KNoppix to recover data from a hard disk like in this case is to access the disk with Knoppix and move the files to another different computer across the network, then rebuild the hard disk and move the data back.

If burning doesnt do it, consider buying a usb-hd-drive. That saved my data some weeks ago. And is a good backup if a flash-drive is too small.
The drives are cheap, you can get about 200 Gigs for about 150 Euros, dont know what the smaller will cost.
If you have an IDE-HD, you can buy a casing with usb-connection.