Quote Originally Posted by OpenIntro
.....When Knoppix came up, I don't see any hda on the desktop, but when I go to the file browser, and click DEVICES, I see hda in the list. When I clicked on it, it said the drive was not mounted....not totally sure what this means, but it looks like it is recognizing the hard drive at least....
You will not see hda on the desktop. At the moment the drive likely isn't even formatted, but even after it is you will not see hda. hda is the drive. What you see on the desktop (when they are available) are the partitions on that drive, not the drive itself. So before you can see any icons on the drive you will need to format it (which you could do in Knoppix but you very well may rather do with Windows. I would certainly try windows first, and only use Knoppix if you couldn't get what you want with windows).

Unfortunately, I'm not as comfortable with an Xp install as I am with Win98. My own notebook came preinstalled, I've only ever installed XP once for a friend. So I don't recall all of the formatting details. I think Xp uses something other than the fdisk program I've grown used to. But my suggestion would be to reinstall XP. When it gets to the issue of formatting the drive you very well might want an NTFS partition (FAT partitions, for example, still have the 4 gig file size limit and that might be an isses in a few rare cases. But I would suggest making no more than half the disk NTFS, and putting a FAT partition on the rest. You likely will not notice the difference between the NTFS and FAT partition under XP if you are the only user of the system and don't do fancy access control stuff (I don't notice the difference, 2/3 of my hard drive is FAT). You might want to leave a small amount of space for a Linux swap partition (512 meg to 1 gig, no more), but it's not really needed (I didn't do this). You will not be able to make the swap partition with the XP formatting tool, all you can do is not make the FAT quite fill the hard disk, and then later create the swap partition with Linux.

Of course, this is assuming that you want to reinstall XP, and also that you will be running Knoppix from the Live CD. I personally don't believe in installing Knoppix to hard disk and don't advise people to do so. But you might want to do so, or even better you might want to install Debian Linux (or some other distro) to a hard disk prtition. If so now is the time to plan on how much space you want to leave for a Linux partition and again a small swap partition as stated above. Many Linux systems actually set up a number of partitions, but I'm not comfortable enough with Linux to know how much space I would need in each of several different partitions, so at least for my use I install all parts of Linux to the same partition, and sometimes share data with windows on a FAT partition.

This certainly adds extra evidence that it is the hard drive itself that is giving you the problem. I still think it would be worth a few dollars to try to read the drive in a desktop system before sending it to any recovery company. And, if you really think it is worth sending the drive to a data recovery company, do your homework to be sure you don't send it to some less reputable company who will try to squeeze you for all they can once they have your drive.