I just got the latest version of Knoppix (v. 3.9) and I am running it on my laptop (Compaq Presario 2100 AMD Athlon XP). It works fine and it recognizes almost all of my hardware save for the built-in wireless adapter. I am interested in using it to retreive some data from my hard drive since Windows XP (Home Edition SP2 in this case) is acting up and refusing to boot. When I click on the icon for my hard disk partition on the desktop, it displays an error saying this message:

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1
missing codepage or other error

In some cases useful info is found in syslog- try dmesg | tail or so

I am hoping that this is not a sign of physical damage to the hard drive, but on the other hand I have no idea what it means and I do not know how to get to the syslog (system log I'm assuming).

I would really like to figure out how to get access to my hard drive (if it is still possible) or how to configure the built-in network card to access the internet. Any help would be very appreciated.