I am having trouble locating my hard drive.

My hdd is compressed, by windows vista. I don't have the original windows vista disk. Using an old xp disk I was able to format the disk thinking this will help eliminate the compression. Of course it didn't and now I am stuck with a compressed hdd and no boot sector. I was wondering if the older version of Knoppix 3.1 I have, will be able to help me detect, decompress and finally install xp again?

As you can see I am very new to this, and have no working knowledge of Knoppix. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Knoppix won't help you uncompress the Vista partition AFAIK but won't deleting the partition (fdisk) remove the compression?