thanks for the reply....i apologize for the double post....

I have a hard drive that seems to have been wiped out or crashed....when I boot it up, all I get is OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND. More than anything, I am just trying to recover the data that is on the hard drive, and then probably replace the hard drive. Harry Kuhman suggested that I run gpart to see if we can recover the partition table, since when I boot up Knoppix, it doesn't seem to be picking up my hard drive.

I just tried gpart /dev/hda

and I get:

*** Fatal error: open(/dev/hda): Permission denied.