External and internal hard drive help

Hey, I need some help guys. My computer(running XP) crashed recently and my friend gave me several versions of knoppix to boot it from in order to recover data. He also gave me an external hard drive to back the data up on. The versions I have, and the problems with each are as follows.
Knoppix 4: Doesn't even recognize my external hard drive.
Knoppix 5: Recognizes my original hard drive, calls it "dirty" and says it needed a "force mount". It also calims it cannout mount my external hard drive because "no file system is specified".
Knoppix 6: Everything I mouse over is read by some text to speech thing, and I can't figure out how to stop it. It gets quite annoying after awhile. It also cannot access(mount) my original hard drive as it claims "a job is pending"

All of these problems are quite bothersome, and in addition, sound doesn't even seem to work in Knoppix 4 or 5. Can someone please help me with any of these problems so I can back up my data?

Most Windows hard drives are now formatted with the NTFS file system (yea, I know, that's redundant), including external hard drives. If the drive is completely empty and you can reformat it as a FAT partition (Fat32) then you'll likely have better results. Years of reading others problems here have convinced me that writing to NTFS with Knoppix never works well in the long run.

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Knoppix 6: Everything I mouse over is read by some text to speech thing, and I can't figure out how to stop it. It gets quite annoying after awhile.

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... you started a Knoppix version for blind peoples. At Knoppix startup, when you can see the little penguin, type in the bottom line after "boot: " knoppix.

Knoppix cheatcodes

You can format (fat32) the external drive with GParted; be careful, don't format the crashed drive!

Now open the filemanger (the second icon from left in the bottom line) and try to mount the crashed drive by clicking on the symbol in the left panel. Perhaps you can see anything of your lost files.


Greetings Werner * http://www.wp-schulz.de/knoppix/summary.html
Own Rescue-CD with Knoppix (Knoppix V6.4.4 remaster)

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Originally Posted by Werner P. Schulz

... you started a Knoppix version for blind peoples. At

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Well that'd explain the noise. I've gotten past that, but I also just noticed that knoppix 6 doesn not detect my hard drive either and that it has no borders on any sort fo window. I will try that formatting program and get back to you soon. Thanks a million for the advice.

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Originally Posted by lorderok

Well that'd explain the noise. I've gotten past that, but I also just noticed that knoppix 6 doesn not detect my hard drive either and that it has no borders on any sort fo window. I will try that formatting program and get back to you soon. Thanks a million for the advice.

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Okay, I reormatted it with QTParted, the program with knoppix 5, I still cannot mount the hard drive, however. this time the error says:
Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdf1,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

What should I try now?

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Okay, I reormatted it with QTParted, the program with knoppix 5, I still cannot mount the hard drive,

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... oh, oh! Which drive did you format and which drive do you can not mount?

Please open a terminal and type

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blkid

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and

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fdisk -l

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Tell us the output of both commands.

If your Windows drive is real damaged, then there is little hope to restore something. You can try TestDisk (on Knoppix CD). This is not a tool for beginners! Read all the documentation!

First of all follow the chapter Disk Duplication.

Greetings Werner * http://www.wp-schulz.de/knoppix/summary.html
Own Rescue-CD with Knoppix (Knoppix V6.4.4 remaster)