Quote Originally Posted by Roberth
I used Windows XP Home

I have backups from a week ago, so I have the raw files, it's just the work that goes undone and that I have to do again. How am I going to repartition an reformat the drive? And then instal an os. I realy like knoppix, is linux something to use insted of win xp for a newbe like me? Does programs and games work in linux?
The default file system for XP is NTFS, so if you bought the computer with Xp on it or installed XP from scratch you very likely have one big NTFS partition. If you upgraded from 98 to XP and you didn't let XP change the file system at that time then you would have FAT. My guess is that you have NTFS, which unfortunately has a habit of having this type of catastrophic thing happen to it when running XP.

Skipping ahead to your last question, I would highly recommend against any foolish thought of installing Knoppix to hard disk. Knoppix is intended as a Live CD and many bad things can happen when installed to hard disk (which it was never intended for). To be fair to both sides there are different schools of thought on this and some very technical people who can make a Knoppix install work, but it is not for the new user. However, Knoppix is based on Debian and Debian is intended for hard disk install. A modern Debian install is a lot less trouble than a Knoppix install. If, after having used the Live CD, you decide that you want to install Linux, I would suggest that Debian is a good place to start. There are certainly other Linux distros and different distros have different advantages, but if you like Knoppix you should like Debian. Debian can be installed by downloading a single CD by BitTorrent form the debian.org site. After that you can install any of the applications in Knoppix and many many more from Internet with your new Debian system.

To answer the second question, any decent partitioning software will let you delete partitions from the partition table. Some old versions of DOS will not touch non-DOS partitions, but third party software (such as Ranish Partition Manager) will do this, even running under DOS. There are tools on the Knoppix CD that will do it, I don't want to rush into this though until you decide for sure that it's time to give up. And if you do install Debian, as part of the install process it will let you elect to keep existing partitions or wipe them out and start fresh.