Heres what I have:
One HP Pavillion CV1000 Laptop
One Windows XP OS
$150 Worth of software
One Knoppix Live DVD
Three Partitions: /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda3
HD: /dev/hda

Problem:
When I partitioned for a fourth hard drive it booted up into the empty partition. I have deleted the empty partition. After trying to reboot the computer comes on to a black screen with a white blinking cursor in the top left hand corner.

I need help sending /dev/sda1 (contains all the information I need) to boot up. /dev/hda show as active with no partitioning table under qtparted in knoppix.

Can someone please help me?

I think this is something that you need to address by setting the BIOS CMOS settings on your computer's motherboard. You should be able to do this by pressing a key while the computer is running its power on self test. There should be a message on the screen telling you to press a particular key to enter setup. This is usually either the F2 key or the delete key.

Once you are in the BIOS CMOS utility you can set the boot device order.

First, we need to sort out the nomenclature. The way I read it, you have ONE hard drive, with three partitions. If true, you would not "partition for a 4th hard drive"...You might--eg create a 4th partition.

I strongly suspect that sda 1-3 are your Windows partitions, and that hda is your CD/DVD. Running from the Knoppix Live CD, open a terminal, and do "fdisk -l"---post the results here.

Meanwhile, don't do anything that would cause data to be written to your hard drive. If you need to recover any data, writing to the drive will reduce the chances of recovery.

Chances are if the OP has partitioned the 4th partition, booted to an empty partition and then deleted it then the original partition table would have been damaged. I just don't believe there was empty unallocated space ready for the 4th partition creation. Most probably it came from deleting an existing partition.

Here is what I got whenever I did a fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60022480896 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7297 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 6044 48548398+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

/dev/sda2 6045 7166 9012465 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

/dev/sda3 7167 7297 1052257+ d7 Unknown

The "fdisk -l" confirms there are 3 partitions sda1, sda2 and sda3 of size about 49Gb, 10Gb and 1Gb respectively in the 60Gb hard disk.

If you can see the inside of sda1 then your data is good. You can mount the partition manually if Knoppix doesn't do it for you (normally it should), with the following terminal commands
Your sda2 can be mount similarly and may still be good. (just change sda1 to sda2 in the above)

I think you last partition is useless at the moment but it may still be good if you have not changed its boundary and can remember it partition type. You can use Knoppix's cfdisk program to change the partition type for sda3.

WARNING: Dirty volume mount was forced by the 'force' mount option.
fusermount: mountpoint is not empty
fusermount: if you are sure this is safe, use the 'nonempty' mount option
Failed to create FUSE mount point: No such file or directory
Retry to create FUSE mount point ...
FATAL: Module fuse not found.
fusermount: mountpoint is not empty
fusermount: if you are sure this is safe, use the 'nonempty' mount option
Failed to create FUSE mount point: No such file or directory
Unmounting /dev/sda1 (Brendan Johnson)

I too would expect Knoppix to automagically mount them - try "df -hT".

This whole thing doesn't look right. Have you told us everything you did ???.
And I *really* hope that HP doesn't use a vendor partition to boot, rather than that flagged NTFS partition.

If it were me I'd just resize to get enough space and install a Linux. But for your peace of mind it would be nice to know what happened.

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root ext2 3.4M 25K 3.4M 1% /
/ramdisk tmpfs 395M 7.3M 388M 2% /ramdisk
/UNIONFS aufs 395M 7.3M 388M 2% /UNIONFS
/dev/hda iso9660 4.1G 4.1G 0 100% /cdrom
/dev/cloop iso9660 5.8G 5.8G 0 100% /KNOPPIX
/dev/cloop2
iso9660 4.6G 4.6G 0 100% /KNOPPIX2

Thats what I tried, and thats what came up

When I said "Have you told us everything you did ???", I meant initially - to cause this problem.

Now that we know /dev/hda is your CDROM/DVD are you just wanting to backup your NTFS data ???.
Or are you wanting to fix the boot issue ???.

I am trying to fix the boot setting. It will not allow me to change the partition I am booting in. I have been trying to fix this problem for the last 3 days. What originally happened was I used PartitionMagic to create a new partition to load Knoppix (I know theres a better way now). Then my computer booted up into the blank partition. After I deleted it I expected it to come back up in the first partition (/dev/sda1), that did not happen however. Now I am stuck here. (I HATE WINDOWS AND BILL GATES)

Oh yeah this pops up whenever I try to open /dev/sda1: WARNING: Dirty volume mount was forced by the 'force' mount option

When you say you are trying to fix the boot setting, do you mean in the BIOS or in the GRUB config file (/boot/grub/menu.lst)?

Note that a computer will not "boot into a blank partition".

I am trying to boot up in a BIOS setting. Then I will try to set up a GRUB boot config.

You can't set which partition to boot in the BIOS--only which DRIVE to boot. (Apologies if I have not understood the issue correctly)

Alright, just out of curiousity what do I need to do to fix my problem?