I apologize for not replying back with the results sooner, but I was away on business and did not have access to the laptop. Thank you for all of your help so far, but I think we can terminate this thread. I only wanted to access a few files off of the hard drive, and after copying them out to a network folder I was able to open them without a problem. Since Knoppix seems to be working fine with all of the other hardware on the machine, I don't think I need any more help at this time.

thanks again!