Quote Originally Posted by markiemark
... i discovered the only thing on the desktop was my documents, and after entering that i found my hard drive but i keep getting an error message when trying to open it, it says unable to mount file system, a.... also in configuration my umask =222,.
Mark,

I have no idea what umask=222 is, have never heard it mentioned as far as I know. Do you need it? Can you run Knoppix without it?

Unfortunately, while Knoppix can very often recover files when Windows has it's all-too-common failure to boot problems, and can sometimes even read a disk that Windows claims can't be read, Windows is quite capable of destroying a disk so completely that not only can't it get at the data but Knoppix can't get at it either. This may have happened to you and there might not be much that you can do. I myself have three such drives that Windows decided to destroy on 3 different occasions.

However, since you say that the partition or partitions are not even showing up on the desktop, another common Windows problem is that it destroys the partition table in the master boot record (MBR), but the partitions themselves are OK and could be open if only the OS knew where they were. Fortunately, Linux has some tools that can inspect a drive and try to repair the partition table for you.

The first tool is gpart. I'm not going to write a full chapter on it here, but search the web for gpart or read the man page for it (type man gpart into a shell). The man page should give you enough information to run gpart and see if it can recover your partition table.

The other tool is testdisk. Again a search for testdisk and Linux should find you a lot of information and there is a man page for it. I generally avoid testdisk, it gives less control and is more of a "for dummies" tool, but it reportedly will do the job.

Good luck.