Recently, I have been having problems with Windows XP (Home Edition SP2). Someone on another forum suggested using Knoppix to access my hard drive in order to get my files off of my laptop before trying to reformat the hard drive. So I downloaded the latest version of Knoppix (v 3.9). It works fine, but I can not access my hard drive partition because everytime I click on the icon for it on the desktop, it displays this message:

Could not mount device. The reported error was:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1,

missing codepage or other error

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg | tall or so

Apart from this, there is also another problem. My network adapter, which is an HP Wireless LAN 54g WL450 (or something like that) can not connect to the Internet or connect to the local network. I do not know how to configure it to run on Knoppix. I would try to download drivers, but I can not access the Internet on my laptop. Any help for both of these problems would be appreciated.

Try the Slax live cd.
http://www.tlm-project.org/torrents/....5.iso.torrent

I would have suggested the same thing. Slax has proven to be much more functional as a rescue disk than any other live-cd I've used (MEPIS, MandrakeMove, Knoppix, Austrumi).