I'm new to Knoppix and I've been trying this for a couple of days but I cannot get around it. I tried to look for the answers in this forum but I cannot seem to find it - maybe I am not searching better, maybe there's a solution already posted, but please someone help me.

I have a 5-year old Sony VAIO laptop (PCG-FX300), and one day it stopped running while on sleep mode. Each time I tried to boot it, it said that they could not find NTLDR file or NTOSKRNL file, or "Operating System Not Found". I thought that all the files would still be in the hard disk, so I am trying to recover the files, but all I had was System Recovery CD that came with the laptop, which would erase my C partition. One day my friend told me that I could run Knoppix from CD and that way I may be able to backup most of the data in the disk, and that's how I started this.

On the first day, I could not boot Knoppix from CD completely despite several attempt. This morning, I tried again, and at the second attempt today, it finally fully booted. I see Knoppix desktop. But, I am missing my hard drive from the desktop. I see Knoppix CD icon at the top, floppy icon the second, "Hard Disk [sda1]" the third, Knoppix info icon the fourth, and the trash can at the bottom, and that's it. In the "Hard Disk [sda1]", there's nothing related to my hard drive. I think it's just Knoppix. I tried to mount my hard drive, but I do not know what I am doing - I mounted from Konsole:

mount /dev/hdc

but I didn't think I mounted Windows hard drive. It was mounted on /media/hdc, but I did not see my hard drive. I don't know what I am doing. I also tried:

ls /dev

and tried to see hardwares, but I did not find anything listed in there that makes me guess that would be the hard disk.

Please help me! I need to recover my files from Windows hard disk, so I can end misery with this laptop...