My mothers old (~8-9y/o) Dell stopped booting one day. She's resigned to getting a new computer but wants to recover some data from the hard drive (she brought it to the geek squad at best buy and after paying them 90 bucks, they said they couldn't do anything).. so i thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm trying to boot an old version of Knoppix (had the CD from recovering data from corrupted HD a few years ago) and it boots up fine until

"Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab... Done"

then it just hangs... can anyone tell me what is supposed to happen after this? Are there any cheats i can use to bypass this next step to see if the bootup will proceed?

If it matters, my mom simply said 'it wont boot up' and when I first went into setup (F2 after the bios screen) there was no HD detected.. but for some reason (i think after i tried to load knoppix) the C drive now shows up (windows still wont bootup though). Recover Console also doesn't work.. it hangs at some point while booting.

thanks for any thoughts on how to proceed!