Knoppix not finding Hard Drive - PLEASE HELP!

So here's the deal...

I have a lenovo ideapad y510 running Windows Vista that i just recently purchased. Last night my friends decides he wants to get on and mess around in photoshop so i give him my computer. Anyways... while trying to boot up the computer, rather than push the power button he pushed the novo button (used for system recovery) and follows the instructions to recover the system back to original state!!! However, by the time it gets to the status bar that shows how much is complete, he realizes what is going and he cancels it.

He tells me what has happened and when i try to boot up my computer it will not boot because it is missing the bootmgr file. So... i decide to pull out my old knoppix 3.6 CD and try to see what if any files are still there and hopefully back them up before reinstalling vista on my laptop and losing all files. However, normally when i run knoppix the Hard Discs will appear on the desktop as icons, but as of right now there is nothing there and i even plugged in my thumb drive. All that shows is Trash, CD-ROM, Floppy Disk (which i dont have), and KNOPPIX.

My laptop had very important data from work that i have not recently backed up and need it badly. PLEASE HELP.

Thank you for the humorous story about the Chinese putting a "destroy all of my data" button on a computer. I'm sure it seems less funny to you than to someone else, but .....

Anyway, I suspect that you are really screwed, but if you want to try to look at that disc with Knoppix, I'm guessing that it's an SATA drive and that your old 3.6 version was prior to SATA support being added. Since you can post here I realize that you have access to another computer, I suggest that you download via BitTorrent a current version of Knoppix and try again. No promises; I have several drives with bad NTFS partitions that Knoppix can't read, but it's worth a try.

Well I love Lenovo / IBM. The button up there probably was not the best place to put it, but the real problem is that my friend followed all the instructions and began the format!

I am downloading Knoppix v5.1 as right now, but i am on a slow connection and it is 700mb... should only take about another hour lol. Thanks for your help. I'm hoping that a more recent copy of Knoppix might read it. If not do you know any other reason why the hard drive would not be displayed on the desktop on bootup?

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Originally Posted by tsherlin

... If not do you know any other reason why the hard drive would not be displayed on the desktop on bootup?

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The hard drive generally isn't displayed. Partitions on the hard drive are displayed. Other than a broken disk, the reasons these might not be displayed include: lack of support for the type of disk (in this case SATA), lack of partitions, partitions of an unknown type, partitions that a user has had windows encrypt to "protect", and then expresses shock that Knoppix doesn't simply bypass the encryption protection that the user dileberately chose to use, and bad MBR.

Gotcha. Well i didnt have anything encrypted that i know of so i think i may have a chance with the newer version of knoppix.
I hope. Ugh.