Very new to Linux. I have played with it some to know a little.

I am in a situation where my laptop OS (Windows XP) is very hosed up. I can not boot into it at all (safe mode or otherwise) and I will need to reinstall. However, I am trying to use Knoppix Live CD as a means up backing up the hard drive to an external USB drive first. Somewhere, I am missing the boat on something (probably not getting to the root level and permissions correctly). I am able to see the NTFS hard drive partition and the NTFS USB drive but unable to mount them such that I can read from the laptop HD and copy to the USB HD.

I have been reading and searching and not finding anything specific to this. Can anyone point me in the right direction?? I can not reinstall the laptop until I get it backed up!

Thanks for the help.

Ian