Whew boy, ok, I'm running testdisk. The first part showed this (put in code format because it seemed to display better):


Code:
Disk /dev/sda - 250 GB / 232 GiB - CHS 30401 255 63
Current partition structure:
Partition                     Start          End        Size in sectors

1 P Dell Utility              0 1  1	    12 254 63      208782
2 P HPFS - NTFS              13 0 52     1318 107  5    20971520  [RECOVERY]
Invalid NTFS boot
3 * HPFS - NTFS	         1318 107  6    30074 207 13    461971448
3 * HPFS - NTFS	         1318 107  6    30074 207 13    461971448
4 E extended LBA          30074 207 22    30401  42 41      5242880
5 L Sys=DD                30074 239 54    30401  42 41      5240832
At least I can see that there is a drive! According to the TestDisk tutorial the "invalid NTFS boot" means that I probably have a corrupted filesystem at the very least. Started running the Quick Search but it seemed to hang up at about 13%. I pressed STOP and it offered me the option for deeper search, which is currently running. I'll wait awhile and see what happens. Any idea how long it might take to run? In other words, how will I know when to abort due to no progress?

Not much in the way of sounds that I can tell, a very faint brrrrrt sound, rhythmic (meaning regular every other second) but can't tell if that is the fan or something...I didn't pay attention to the normal sounds of the laptop before the crash. The damn thing is only a couple of months old.

If the drive is physically damaged, is there still a chance I could remove it from the laptop and hook it up to a desktop and maybe still salvage something? And can you hook a laptop hard drive into a desktop motherboard and power supply anyway? I have an old XP box I can use for this (had to do it with a bad desktop hard drive once before, but I don't think there was physical damage to that one).

Saw a reference to a companion program to testdisk called PhotoRec...is it in Knoppix too? I found step by step tutorial for it too...