I understand that Knoppix can be used to read files on a corrupted Windows hard drive. The hard drive in question, which was originally set up in a dual-boot system, was installed in an old PIII system (1 Ghz processor, 256 MB RAM, 80 Gig hard drive divided into 2 partitions) which I’d bought used.

Shortly after I got it, the motherboard suffered a catastrophic failure which rendered both partitions unreadable by the usual means (I’ve since trashed that motherboard and re-built the system from scratch with the old processor and RAM. It works decently).

In the malfunction I lost some files which I did not have the chance to back up. I’ve just now tried reading the damaged hard drive using Knoppix. The Linux partition (which I think was called Hda1?) shows up fine, even though it’s no longer bootable. When I tried accessing the Windows partition (Hda0?), I got an error message saying that the drive was unmountable and did not have a detectable file system (it’s possible that I could have re-formatted the Windows partition and forgotten about it).

Is my problem beyond the capabilities of Knoppix? Do I need to purchase a Windows-based undelete/rescue program? Or is the drive partition too badly corrupted for any kind of data recovery?