Hello, I just finished downloading Knoppix and have a few questions.

My main computer is a laptop. My Desktop used to be my main computer until I had a big failure.

On the desktop, I had a 6GB hard disk installed. Then I installed Windows XP Pro on this drive. When I got a new drive, I used Partition Magic to image the 6GB drive onto the 30GB drive. This created a C:\ partition and a D:\ partition. At first everything was fine. At some point later, I had to reinstall Windows. It reinstalled successfully, but because the D:\ partition was NTFS at the time of the reinstall, I can no longer access the D:\ partition. I had very important files on that D:\ partition, and have been trying to recover those files with no success. I tried installing a second hard drive with XP installed and set as the main drive, and set the 30GB drive to slave status. But that didn't help either.

So when I found out that you could recover files from bad partitions using Linux, I thought I'd give it a try. But since I'm a newbie, I don't want to screw up my desktop any more than it already is.

Is it possible to access a damaged/unreadable (at least to Windows) NTFS partition via Linux?