Well, i awoke this morning to a nice little error msg informing me that my Windows OS cannot be loaded. HMmm...soo, i put in my trusty (i think) little INSERT disk and am now trying to recover some important information off my system before i reinstall windows. To begin i tried mounting hdb1 (my music and other somewhat important stuff) to a folder in the mount directory. Then i tried mounting the drive that contains windows...and all my documents. Now, i can only assume that since this is physically my first IDE drive on the system, it would take the place of hda1. Well, trying to mount this i got an error saying wrong fs type, bad optio, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, or too many mounted filesystems. Now, i know for certain my windows hd is NTFS so i cant be the wrong fs type, wrong option?? same command works for the other drive, bad superblock - this is what i am unsure about, could the superblock on that drive be corrupt and possibly be the reason why it couldn't load windows in the first place....then i doubt there are too many mounted filesystems because if i umount the one that works (to free up some spacea) i still get the error on the first. Anyways, i'm kind of rambling now b/c im not 100% sure what im talking about :P, but hopefully someone could help me out. Thanks!

Note: I am using "mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows" command

Try using mount like fstab:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs ro,user 0 0

And, use a knoppix CD so you can burn your important files to a CD with k3b. Knoppix also makes icons for all the mount points right on the desktop. You just click on the icon to mount the partition, launch k3b, and you're off.