I am having trouble locating my hard drive.

[whatsit2u]

My hdd is compressed, by windows vista. I don't have the original windows vista disk. Using an old xp disk I was able to format the disk thinking this will help eliminate the compression. Of course it didn't and now I am stuck with a compressed hdd and no boot sector. I was wondering if the older version of Knoppix 3.1 I have, will be able to help me detect, decompress and finally install xp again?

As you can see I am very new to this, and have no working knowledge of Knoppix. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

[Clinton]

Knoppix won't help you uncompress the Vista partition AFAIK but won't deleting the partition (fdisk) remove the compression?