I agree....I don't want to rush....but then again.....I WANT to rush! It's nice to have a glimmer of hope! ha!

I was running Windows XP Home SP2 on this Sony Vaio laptop. I had been out of town for a few days and when I came back, I was checking email and what not and noticed everything running very slow. All of a sudden the computer just rebooted and I got an error (don't even remember the error now). Turned it off for a bit and turned it back on, and Operating System Not Found....that's about it really. A 4 month old brand new top of the line laptop goes kaput for no reason (which is the BEST reason for them to go!)

On the Knoppix Desktop are: Trash. CD-ROM, Floppy disk and KNOPPIX....that's it....no partition icons :/ Not sure why or how they would have been destroyed. After I shut off the computer, it has sat shut off for a couple of months now until I recently started to work with it. So maybe we are working with destroyed partitions? So Knoppix is meant to auto-detect these partitions? I'm willing to get my hands a little dirty myself before sending it off for the dirty (and expensive) work to get done for me....

Thanks for the book suggestions and the links. I have actually come across most of the threads that you mention, including the one from today where you mentioned Helix. Browsed the Helix site, but was not sure what it was for. My biggest problem is that I have never worked with Linux before, but I think I should pick it up quickly. I have come across a few mentions of gpart but am not sure what to do with it. Will keep reading though.

until you better understand what caused the problem, what the problem is, and what you really want to do about it.
This is my biggest issue....I don't know what caused the problem or what the problem actually is, so I don't KNOW what I want to do about it :P