Quote Originally Posted by Crimpshrine
....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.
First, understand that Knoppix can't fix all windows problems. If windows screws up one of it's own partitions so bad that it or Linux can't read it, then it is not Knoppix's fault that the information can not be read. That said, Knoppix can often read data that windows cannot on windows own file systems. But that you are not seeing desktop icons for the partitions makes me suspect that there is something very wrong with the drive.

Next, you need to underderstand the difference between a drive and a partition. In general, you don't mount a drive, you mount a partition on a drive. Even if the drive only has one partition, you mount the partition, not the drive. Normally the first IDE hard drive is hda. hdc would be the thrid IDE device, often an optical drive but sometimes a hard drive. Since a hard drive can have 4 physical partitions, the partitions on hdc, if it is a partitioned hard drive, would be named hdc1, hdc2 hdc3 and hdc4. If there is an "extended partition" on the hard drive you would not mount the extended partition, you would mount the "logical drives" contained in the extended partition. For drive hdc these are named hdc5, hdc6, hdc7 and so on, and there is no hdc4. In most windows systems you either just have hdc1 or you have hdc1 and an extended partition that contains hdc5, hdc6 and so on, and there usually is no hdc2 or hdc3 (unless you have multiple OS's on the disk).

If you can't mount hdc1 and you really think there is a physical partition on the hard disk that you want to mount, the partition table might be mucked up (happens in windows a lot more than it ever should). There is a utility in Linux called gpart that will try to guess the partition table for you based on what it finds on the hard drive, see man gpart for details.