Rescue data from PB laptop

[thetall82]

Hello,
I'm new to this forum. I have an issue and hope I am posting in the right place :P

Last week the lcd screen of my 4 years old Packard Bell notebook (I don't have it here so can't provide more details right now) died.
I connected it to an external monitor and I was able to see the grub bootloader (it's dual boot WindowsVista/LinuxMint7) and boot Mint, but after the logo spash screen it didnt log in my account, showing a black screen. The graphics are disturbed and the screen is blinking, showing coloured stripes... I fear the graphic card isn't feeling very well too.
I then tried Mint in failsafe mode but I couldn't read any text menu, because once again the display seemed disturbed and the whole text was messed up by strange characters.

So I tried an old Knoppix 5 (year 2006, KDE 3.5. and it worked! I could start the KDE section and so the partitions as drives.
BUT...
while the system could mount the windows partitions, it could NOT MOUNT the linux mint ones. It gave me an "unknown fs" error, I think it's because the partitions are formatted with EXT4 while that Knoppix version was to old to support that filesystem.

I tried Knoppix 6.4.4 but it gave me the same black screen problem as in my first attempt with Mint, while Knoppix 6.0.1 gives me a resolution/frequency error.

I tried some tutorials and searched this forum trying to boot in lower resolutions but I couldn't get it to work. I just want to copy some important data to an usb harddisk.
Any idea?

Many thanks in advance for any help.
Regards
Giorgio

[rusty]

If you are at all comfortable operating from command line, you could try booting into a non graphic runlevel. At the boot prompt type

knoppix 2

You could also try some video cheatcodes at the boot prompt , possibly one will play nice with the external monitor.