Hi. So, I accidently formatted my drive when using gpart last week, and lost ~230GB of data I can't afford to lose. Though I have reinstalled Ubuntu, I have downloaded little else and am told that the bulk of my data should be recoverable if I boot from Knoppix with an external HD attached.

I have tried 3 different distros of Knoppix (5.1.1, 5.1.0, and 3.8.1). All are proper images, and all have been burned at very low speeds. MD5 checksums are fine. So, yes, I've read the FAQ's and obeyed them. My problem persists:

"Can't find Knoppix filesystem, sorry." Then I am returned to a "very limited shell". I have tried entering: [ knoppix nodma ] into the boot menu, because some advice I found on the forums suggested it. This has no effect, either.

I am running an Intel 2.4 quadcore, 500GB 7200rpm Barracuda SATA, 4 GB 667hz RAM, 512MB nVidia 8200. My opitcal drive is a 24x lightscribe from LG. I don't know if more specific specs are needed, ask and I will try to provide. I just really want my files back, so I'm hunting for advice on how to make Knoppix boot, or else any other effective strategies for data recovery. Please help, this is urgent (I am sort of paralyzed until I get these files back).

Jon