My windows crashed and i need to reformat but i don't want to delete the information on my HD, and for some reason ubuntu says my hd is inaccessable and will not let me open it. I tried using the disk manager, but it just does nothing when i click on the 'enable' button. Any suggestions? I am a new linux user

I do not have your gui, but the command line interface should be similar.

Get to the commandline by activating a "terminal" (looks like a little black monitor icon)

At the $ prompt, type
$cat /proc/partitions
This will show what was found during booting up. I expect you will see something like
major minor #blocks name

3 0 195360984 hda
3 1 96358 hda1
3 2 1951897 hda2
3 3 19535040 hda3

Then look at /dev/hda1, for example:

$ ls -l /dev/hda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 1 2003-11-06 19:13 /dev/hda1

This shows a partition that ordinary users may not access, only root, or members of the disk group.

For your purposes, you may want to make the partition readable by an ordinary guy, so
sudo mkdir /mnt/part
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/part -o ro
sudo ls -l /mnt/part

Try ultimate boot cd for windows to recover your data.

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

But you'll need to make the CD so hope you have access to another computer. From there you can just move all your data to a external drive.

Hope that helps.

Do you currently have a dual boot and you're trying to mount your Windows partition or are you trying to use a live CD to recover your Windows drive?

Either way, this should come in handy:
http://ubuntuguide.org/#mountunmountntfs

Or this:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindows