The hard drive onone of my PCs got fscked recently. Windows was installed, but then the hard drive got corrupted, and it won't boot. I was able to boot Knoppix and now I need to get to the busted drive to get some data off of it. During boot, knoppix found the drive, and mounted it. Now, how do I access it?

well, you need to mount it with the mount command.

For example:

mkdir /win
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /win

Where -t is the filesystem type.

unfortunately, XP was installed by Compaq, so the drive is NTFS. Mounting gives a wrong fstype error, and the NTFS is certainly the root of the problem.

Samba seems to be included with Knoppix and there seems to be some utiltity for accessing Windows hard drives, but it needs to download some drivers from MS. Which of these is the right tool? Remember, the hard drive is non-bootable, so I can't uses it except through Knoppix.

I'm not sure about Samba, I don't know much about it. You should be able to mount your NTFS partition though, if you have NTFS support.

Most distros of Linux have NTFS support built-in, but RedHat is an exception. Fedora might be too.

There are RPMs to install (http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html) that should be the easiest fix for your problem.

Also make sure you are using '-t ntfs' once you have the RPM installed.

I was able to mount the drive with captive-ntfs. Now, when I try to ls the new directory, I get " ls: .:Stale NFS file handle ", and there is nothing in the folder when I view it in Konquerer. BTW, I didn't download the Fedora RPM's because I am using Knoppix and it came with captive-ntfs.

Hm.... Well according to this post here ( http://www.jankratochvil.net/piperma...er/000035.html ) by the author of Captive-NTFS:

"'Stale NFS file handle' generally means a crash of Captive process.
There should by always some error message in your '/var/log/messages' (syslogd) in the case of 'Stale NFS file handle'."

I didn't realize you were using Knoppix, sorry 'bout that... I believe SLAX (http://slax.linux-live.org/) has read-NTFS support and doesn't use Captive. It is only 185MB download and might be worth a try, if digging around the internet for whatever shows up in /var/log/messages doesn't help.

If you can get it working, post about it back here, I've used Captive and it has never given me a problem.