I am new to the forums and new to Linux as well. I have thought about it many times but just never found enough guts to attempt using it before..but necessity is the mother of invention so here I am.

I have a Dell PC with windows Xp that failed to restart after a power outage it went into auto restart and caught itself in a loop of restarts and wont see the hard drive so therefore will not start up in windows at all I downloaded feather Linux onto a cd and it does start the PC In Linux but I cant seem to figure out how to find the hard drives in the pc to get the info off of it can someone point me in the right direction Please.
larry

Welcome to LQ. You should post questions in other forums, like Linux General, not in the member intro forum.

Still, to try and help, I don't think feather linux is cut out for this job, I would use:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
instead, or something dedicated to rescue.

Thanks for your pointing me in the right direction

I did download Gnome and the rescue distro and we were unsuccessful in our attempt to mount or gain access to the drive in question. as the heads are locked up and hanging. We did get access tot he other HD and pulled the data from it so I I can now load my OS unto that that drive and restore the data to that drive . The data i lost i guess is the price I pay for not backing up I have been told that most problems with the hard drive hanging up are electronic so that if I can fond the exact Hd as the bad one I can swap the electronics and gain access to the hard drive so that is what I am going to try and do .. I wil use this tinme to get used the the Linux os possibly shift my pc to that os

Thanks again for you links and suggestions

Larry

As a last resort, if you have valuable data on the drive, you can send it to a place that has a clean room and they can mount the disk manually and recover the data. It costs quite a bit tho ... the data should probably be valuable to consider this option.