I've heard before that Dell does some funky things with drives. And my situation seems like this may be the case.

My goal here is to use Knoppix to recover data from partitions where Windows is gummed up such that it won't boot. I am a complete newbie to Knoppix or any other Linux flavor for that matter.

I downloaded Knoppix (the newbie version IIRC) and burnt the CD without issue. I tried it in a troublesome machine and had some issues, so I decided to try it in a perfectly good working machine. I have a Dell GX-260 with an IDE hard drive and 512MB RAM. For this discussion, that is the PC I'll be referring to.

Here's the weirdness:
I successfully boot from the Knoppix CD and I get icons on my desktop for Hard Disk [hda1] and Hard Disk [hda2] as well as others. (Dell PCs come with a diagnostic partition and a second partition for the OS.) If I choose hda1, it works perfectly. I can see files and it works great. I also tried inserting my USB drive post-boot and it recognized it. Wonderful!

Still, my goal is to get data from the 2nd partition. However, clicking on hda2 yields the following error:

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
Unexpected sectors per cluster value (127).
Failed to startup volume: Invalid argument
Failed to mount '/dev/hda2': Invalid argument.
The device '/dev/hda2' doesn't have a valid NTFS.
Maybe you selected the wrong device? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/hda, not /dev/hda1)? Or the other way around?

So apparently it sees the drive and both partitions, but despite the fact that the 2nd partition is perfectly fine, it doesn't like it. Is it just that it doesn't like NTFS? I think the first partition is FAT32 or FAT16.

I poked around in the forum looking for a solution. I found someone suggest to another user that I open a terminal window and type some commands. Here's what happened:

fdisk -l /dev/hda
Cannot open /dev/hda
fdisk -s /dev/hda1

fdisk -s /dev/hda2
39021885

I'm now stuck. Is there a way I can overcome this 'sectors per cluster' issue? I wonder why the command line stuff doesn't work? (I find that troublesome.) Is the solution to Dell problems like this published somewhere? Can someone link me to it?

Thanks in advance for your help.