HELP. trying to fsck or fdisk the hardrive. zero-length. I/O

[hdd_messed]

i have a dying hardrive on an ibm laptop that i wish to get data off. it has redhat linux on it and will not boot of the hdd.

so i turned to knoppix, made the cd, and booted off the cd. it managed to boot in
knoppix 2

my problem is finding out the proper partition and fixing it.

but every fdisk or fsck command i give returns an i/o error as follows:

for a list of partitions on device hda
>fdisk -l /dev/hda
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0

and fsck partition hda1
>fsck /dev/hda1
fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
e2fsck 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 2
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 4
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 6
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hda1
Could this be a zero-length partition?

i believe the /etc/fstab is incorrect, it follows:

/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/pts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/auto/floppy auto user,noauto,exec,umask-000 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/auto/cdrom auto user, noauto,exec,ro 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ext2 noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda7 /mnt/hda7 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0
*Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda8 /mnt/hda8 auto noauto, users, exec 0 0

how can knoppix even run without access to a hdd. it must have space, no. where is root mounted?

how can i find out the proper partition and fix the %$$££bugger?

[Markus]

end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0

This is often seen when DMA is not supported, try the cheatcode nodma.

how can knoppix even run without access to a hdd. it must have space, no. where is root mounted?

It makes a ramdisk out of your RAM and uncompresses there what it needs.

[hdd_messed]

[quote="Markus"]

end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 0

This is often seen when DMA is not supported, try the cheatcode nodma.

thanks for the info. on nodma and ramdisk

now i get no hda entries in /etc/fstab

fdisk -l /dev/hda
returns nothing

it is not possible to run fsck on /dev/hda1. there is not device at that address.

what is the next step for adding devices.

[Markus]

Do you have some kind of RAID or SATA disk?
You said you wanted to get data of it, can't you just copy it off with cp or dd before trying to fix it? Obviously you need to have the devices detected for that..
You might want to try some other no-cheatcodes: noapic nodma nomce noscsi noswap