I was pleasantly surprised to find and recover my files from a "dead" hard drive using the latest version of Knoppix. The only complicated part (after I bought the a trusty usb flash drive) was getting knoppix to mount and change the USB drives status to read/write. After that it was easy using Konquerer to pick the directories needed to copy and off to the USB drive they went. I also had to issue only a few small commands to get my wireless card to start flashing and access to the internet was obtained without the hard drive using firefox. Because of this success, I'll always keep a boot disk around in case another hard drive crashes.