Hard Drive Unknown Error

A friend of mine brought her laptop to me with a crashed XP install. I've been able to boot to a KNOPPIX live cd, but when I try ato access ths laptop's hard drive I get the following message,

Unable to mount device "Error org.freedesktop.HAL.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure"

Does anyone have any ideas how to mount the hard drive or is it dead?
Thanks for the help

-- Cha0s

You might try to do the mount operation manually. Which Knoppix version do you use?

When I got such an error message I opened a terminal and entered

Code:

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sudo mkdir /media/myHdd
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/myHdd

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Then I got an explanation what went wrong and what I had to do next.

Maybe you have to use another partition instead of /dev/sda1. You can get a list of the available partitions by executing

Code:

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sudo fdisk -l

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I'm using KNOPPIX 6. I did what you said and manually mounted the hdd. I had to force mount it because XP "improperly" shut down and the system was still showing that it was active. After force mounting it i was able to get to the data on it. It's slow going but I'm pulling it off now. Thanks for the help.

-- cha0s