Knoppix does not display hard drive on desktop

Please bear with me, I am very new to this. My computer keeps giving me the dreaded blue screen, so in an attempt to save some stuff on my hard drive I downloaded knoppix and am running it from the disk. My hard drive does not show up on the desktop, but I can find it in the file:/dev. It is listed as sda1. The problem is that I do not have permission to read it...

I would appreciate any help anyone can give me. I really need to access some stuff I have stored if at all possible. If you need more information just let me know.

Thank you again.

You can use sfc /scannow using Vista disc and it will let you start up so you will be able to backup my files.

Yes if your vista disc can recognize your harddrive but not XP. Then it is not a hardware problem. Most likely your system has those new SATA drive controller that XP is too old to recognize.

Microsoft is pushing really hard on the Vista, so they no longer support the XP and no more device driver will be provided by them.

On the other hand, hardware manufacturer only provides driver for Vista. Very often the case on the new mother board for the Gigabit ethernet card. A lot of user experienced the same difficulty when they try to use XP instead. The solution is to buy a network card with xp driver comes with it and install it on the machine in order to have network connection.

However, you may try your luck to go to the manufacturer web site and see if they provide driver for the xp or even linux.

If you have that problem, change the permissions by right-clicking on the your drive, and choosing "Change read/write mode" Then, you can simply drag and drop files from your hard drive to your USB drive to Backup your Data

Thank you all for your input. I think I should clarify a little though. My computer is a Dell XPS, so it is running Windows XP. All of the sudden my husband said it started getting massive pop-ups and then all could get was the blue screen. I am assuming we have a virus or worm.

So, I tried to access the hard drive using Knoppix, which would not show my hard drive on the desktop. When I find the sda1 file it does not give me the option of changing the permission when I right click it.

Any other suggestions?

If you try to mount partitions manually using the "mount" command, I'd suggest that you use some other directory than /mnt/xxx (and don't modify /etc/fstab)

Code:

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mkdir /home/knoppix/hda1
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /home/knoppix/hda1

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or

Code:

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mkdir /home/knoppix/hda1
sudo mount -t vfat -o umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 /dev/hda1 /home/knoppix/hda1

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The two primary partitions are probably /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2.
Empty extended partition is probably /dev/hda5, but if it doesn't have any filesystem on it, then you can't mount that partition before you create a filesystem on it.

Thank you for the help. After performing your suggestion, a file was place in the knoppix home, titled hda1, but it was empty. I then tried using

Code:

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sudo konqueror

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This gave me all rights to all files. However, I was still unable to get the stuff to open I wanted to.

Anyway, I did manage to get my computer to boot in last known good configuration (finally). So, I was able to get my files off before doing a complete recovery.

Again, thank you all so much for your help.