Help with Knoppix 6.0

dinky73

Hi
I posted yesterday as my pc has an unmountable boot volume error. The pc is old and we don't care about hat but would like to retrieve some files if we can. I don't have the original xp disk to do the repair stuff so my IT friend suggested using Knoppix. we couldn't get it to work last night but this mornign I tried and it worked.
I know have the Knoppix desktop and tray icons but have no idea what to do with them! I phoned my IT friend who directed me to where my files would be but it wouldn't let me in (some error message that I can't remember now). The only thing on the Knoppix desktop is a house icon with desktop underneath. When you click on that it takes you into the folder which says no sub folder.
I can click on the New Volume drive which is my external USB drive and I can see all my stored files on there but there was another icon called somthing like 36.3 GB Volume and it wouldn't let me in - is that my hard drive from the old pc?
Not sure what to do now. My IT friend wasn't sure and he was at work so couldn't help futher. I've left it on my pc as I daren't shut it down in case it won't load again. Any advice? I've come so far so i hope I can retrieve something.
Thanks

mr_fishbulb

If I remember correctly, you need to mount the other volume - does it show as an option when you right-click?

dinky73

Hi

Error message was.

Unable to Mount device
Error org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure

I did then right click and select Mount Volume and then the same error message came up

Thanks

Robin_T_Cox

Try putting your query to the Knoppix forums:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/

fwor

It's looking more likely that there's a serious problem with the hard disk.

Ubuntu would have been a better choice, because it detects and auto-mounts any volumes that it finds, and it's easy to add GPARTED, the very flexible partition editor. However, it looks like Knoppix is trying to mount the volume anyway, and failing.

One other thing to try would be to use the LiveCD version of GPARTED:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

It's small, so shouldn't take long to download. Burn it and run it as a LiveCD. Select the correct disk drive (drop-down box at top right, usually) and see if it can find a valid partition - if you unplug all other external storage devices it should be the only one, with a name like /dev/sda or /dev/hda. If the filesystem is corrupted, you can right-click on it and choose "Check" and it will run the Linux equivalent of chkdsk on it.

Don't worry about shutting it down - if it has booted once from the CD, there's no reason to suppose that it won't do so again.

fuzzball172

if there is a problem with your hard drive there is a fantastic program called Spinright, from a company called GRC. It can fix all sorts of disk errors, even works miracles on seemingly dead drives... might be worth a look.