I have Dell Inspiron laptop running Vista 32 that crashed about 2 months ago. I'm not sure why it crashed, but it gave me trouble after trying to install a printer driver. Then one day it ran a chkdsk on startup, and never booted again. It won't boot in safe mode, and none of the startup repair or system restore points worked. All I have left is restore factory settings, but I'm trying to extract my data before I do that.

I'm a smart girl, but I don't do code. I'm learning what I can, but the Knoppix Live 6 comes up with an error, "unable to mount device", when I try to access my HD files (wanting to copy them to another hard drive). I've looked up trying to force it to mount the drive, which brings me into using code... I've tried:

su root
mount/dev/sda3

and I'm told no such file or directory exists. (Same with sda1, but it looks like my drive comes up as sda3). I've tried:

su root
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/sda1 -o force (and -0 and -O, since I couldn't tell what that was)

and a help tutorial of commands appears.

So, since my brain has absorbed as much as I can force it to at the moment, could someone please tell me, 1) am I doing something wrong? 2)is there something else (like Ultimate Boot CD, which I've created but don't know how to use) I should try? or 3) can I be put out of my misery and accept that I've done everything I can and I should just reformat the drive? (and if so, what should I use for file recovery after the drive has been reformatted?) Thank you for easing my tired, troubled mind, I hope!

Bridget