I have a Dell Latitude D505 system. As of Friday, the computer will no longer boot, reporting a disk error [I'll leave it at that, rather then going off on a long rant about this and other problems I'm having on this barely 2-month-old notebook]. Before I send it back to Dell for replacement, I'm tryign whatever I can to attempt to recover some files from it - namely a month's worth of classnotes I've been taking on the computer and never backed up, along with a few other misc. files that I'd rather not lose.

I've played with Knoppix in the past (version 3.3 I think), and have since moved on to a full Gentoo 64-bit-Linux installation on my desktop, and was wondering if Knoppix might provide a way for me to access my data and back it up somehow.

Are there any tools for Knoppix that might be able to recover data from the drive, assumming that it's even possible for any data to be read off of the drive (all I get from it's diagnostics is a self-test failure)? The notebook runs Windows XP Home with the standard NTFS file system (which I know that Linux has never been very good at interacting with). This of course would also assume that I can get the system to boot from a Knoppix CD (haven't tried yet) and either gain network access or mount my flash drive for me to backup the files to (the computer has no cd burner or floppy drive)


Thanks