I have a Toshiba laptop running Vista. Sorry I don't know all the spec's as it is my son's. It presents with a corrupt OS as stated by the Vista repair disc. I would like help recovering his photo's and documents. I have several live CD's: Slax, Mepis, Koppix etc. My knowledge of linux is limited. My terminal work consists of copying Bash on the terminal and hitting enter. I tried Slax on laptop & entered "ntfs -3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows" in a terminal and received a lot of info i'm not sure of what to do with. Anyway, if you could point me to a tutorial or tell me what I should put in the terminal I could get on with this. I would like to maybe run clamav or at least get his files. Also the best distro to do this on. Thanks

I would use a live cd... Ubuntu would work. Create a mount point fo the hard drive Mount the hard drive with either ordepending on how the system sees the hard drive. From there you should be able to use the gui to copy files over to a USB thumb drive.

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Download and run PartedMagic , it's a Linux based bootable distro that can be either burnt to a CD or to put on a USB thumbdrive.

PartedMagic is mainly used to partition HDDs using Gparted , but is is a fairly comprehensive distro that will automatically mount drives so that you can recover files , it has a GUI file browser , and for other people , it even has the old file browser Midnight Commander on it.

It has clamav on it , so you can scan all the HDDs.

The best way of using PartitionMagic is to download the .iso file ( 80 Mb ) , burn it to disk , boot up into the disk and use the built in utility on it to create a bootable USB thumbdrive so that you can connect to the internet to download the latest clamav virus definitions and write it to the USB thumbdrive.
It has networking capabilities and you can connect to the internet very easily with Chrome as the default web browser.

PartedMagic is a very easy to use distro that doesn't need any experience with Linux and it is a very slick and polished distro.

http://partedmagic.com/download.html

Why not mount it in a GUI file manager and copy the files?

Anyway, to learn about the command line, read the "LinuxCommand" tutorial in my sig.