Hi Rusty,

Thanks for your suggestion. I've been fiddling around with the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Everything still hung up every time I tried to access my computer hard drive. I'm pretty certain there is something physical wrong with the hard drive. Dell has labeled it damaged and is sending a replacement. In the meantime, I'm still trying to sneak in some way and capture some of my data in any way possible ($1500 - $3000 and up for a data recovery service is definitely out of my range ). Although I'm a newbie, I'm thinking I might as well try to stumble my way through Linux/Knoppix stuff and see if I can get better results. Since the data is probably lost in any case, what have I got to lose? Any suggestions on where to begin? I read somewhere that I might be able to do something from the root command line but have no idea where to start with that...

Thanks!!!
Jen

Oh, also saw reference to something called testdisk that might have worked for some folks but couldn't figure out how to access it through Knoppix...