UBCD booted up fine, but, for whatever reason, it couldn't read the disk at all. It simply told me that my hard drive was 'corrupted and unreadable' and wouldn't open it at all. I assume that this is the same problem Knoppix is having when it says 'volume is dirty, forced to continue', but somehow manages to read the disk O.K. I don't know anything about the registry at all, so I couldn't try that option. I found the undelete tools easily enough, most of them didn't work, but one called 'recuva' worked perfectly, it managed to track down pretty much everything I've ever deleted off my hard drive, and there was no sign of stuff from my documents being deleted. In fact, a lot of the deleted stuff there had been overwritten by stuff from My Documents, so I am pretty certain that my profile still exists and has not been deleted. Unfortunately 'recuva' didn't tell me where to find it.

Is there some way to manually 'force' UBCD windows to read the hard drive, like Knoppix seems to do automatically? Can I still use the registry to track down my profile? If so, how? Is there a better way entirely to access a 'corrupted' disk?