Hello,

My computer was running on FC5 when my computer failed. When I press the power button to start up the computer, my monitor cannot detect any signal. My guess is that either my power supply or my motherboard is dead.

How do I access the files in my hard drive? I only have access to a Windows computer?

Thank you.

Get a Knoppix CD and boot into a linux environment. You could then mount your partitions.

So do I take the hard drive out from my defective computer and put it in a removable hard drive enclosure, then use Knoppix to access that drive?

That would work or you could just connect the drive internally, if you don't have an external case. Knoppix does not depend on a hardrive to boot. You could even take the windows drive out and put the other in its place temporarily.

Are you getting any "beeps" from POST (Power On Self Test)? Could also be a bad video card, bad memory, etc. The beeps would be trying to communicate this to you. Figuring out what the beeps mean requires knowing what specific BIOS you have. What happens when you hit the power button. Listen closely. Do your fans spin up momentarily and then shutdown? Do you have a fuse/breaker on your powersupply or your powerstrip/UPS? Did some joker move your little powersupply slider from 120 to 240? Have you done anything recently to the box? Installed additional memory, etc.?

If your computer has a dead motherboard, you won't be able to boot anything. Not Linux, not Windows, not a Knoppix CD, etc. So you will have to remove the harddrive and use a different (working) computer to access the drive.

How you install the harddrive to the other computer can vary. Install it as an internal drive, put it in an external enclosure and access it via USB or FireWire, or get an IDE-to-USB convertor and power setup (assuming the drive is IDE). Those IDE-to-USB convertors are kindof like the guts of an external enclosure, except no case, no cooling fans ... your drive sits there naked on your desk with this dongle plugged into it.

I would go the "install as an internal drive" route if you can (the host computer would need an unused IDE connector and a bay to put the drive in). IDE-to-USB convertors can be quite finicky from what I've read. I don't own one so this is hearsay, not personal experience. External enclosures can be finicky as well.

Once you have the drive attached to a working computer, I would boot that computer with a Knoppix CD so you can work in Linux. I have no idea how well the Windows add-ons really support Linux formatted filesystems. I wouldn't trust them myself.

I was using my newly bought removable hard drive, when the computer hangs and did not respond. I pressed the hard reset button and the monitor displays no signal. The startup screen that shows the motherboard configuration was not displayed, there was no beep, the fan runs and I could also smell something burning.