Hi, I'm rather new to Linux and am attempting to recover a failing disk drive with Knoppix and GNU ddrescue.
They suggest binding to the raw device in order to recover individual sectors rather than having the entire cluster be unreadable do to kernel cache limitations.
The raw command apparently needs and can not see the '/dev/rawctl' character special file, even though it seems that it was successfully created.
I wonder if this is beyond Knoppix's standard capabilities (and if it would be easy to tell from the package list or kernel or some such thing), or if I'm over looking something.

I have included a transcript of what happened below:
This is Knoppix 4.0.2 live CD, but the Knoppix HDD installation gave the same results.

root@1[knoppix]# raw -qa
Cannot open master raw device '/dev/rawctl' (No such file or directory)
root@1[knoppix]# mknod /dev/rawctl c 162 0

(repeat to confirm creation):
root@1[knoppix]# mknod /dev/rawctl c 162 0
mknod: `/dev/rawctl': File exists
root@1[knoppix]# mknod /dev/raw/raw1 c 162 1
mknod: `/dev/raw/raw1': No such file or directory
root@1[knoppix]# mkdir /dev/raw
root@1[knoppix]# mknod /dev/raw/raw1 c 162 1
root@1[knoppix]# raw /dev/raw/raw1 /dev/hda4
Cannot open master raw device '/dev/rawctl' (No such device or address)
root@1[knoppix]# raw -qa
Cannot open master raw device '/dev/rawctl' (No such device or address)

root@0[knoppix]# ls -lR /dev/raw*
crw-rw-rw- 1 root video 171, 0 Nov 17 2004 /dev/raw1394
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 162, 0 May 24 21:39 /dev/rawctl
crw-rw---- 1 root disk 27, 32 Jun 5 2001 /dev/rawft0
...(more follow)

Many thanks to anyone who can help out on this!
Don