Ok so I have a little experience using linux, but not a lot, anyway my sister's computer recently went down, she is usuing windows ME... i have now converted her to win XP and working on getting her to UNIX. Anyway, what her computer seems to be missing several dlls that allow windows to boot. She has like 1500 pictures on her hard drive she wants to get off, whenever i try to go into DOS it shows no files on the drive, but it shows a HD size that's like 25 gig's when her drive is 40 gigs, so i know the drive still has files on it. Anyway to make a long story short i got her to buy another HD which i installed windows XP on, and i got a Knoppix disk and popped the knoppix disk in thinking i would just transfer the files to the new HD and then reformat the old drive to NTFS. However i can't get the knoppix disk to read FAT files. I know i need to set of a mount with F formatting on it but i just can't figure out how. Thanks for the help.
Nathan.

BTW does XP recognize the old drive?

yeah it recongnizes it but all it will do is ask me if i would like to format the drive.

Doesn't sound good. You can try to mount the drive.
Create a directory
mkdir /fatdrive
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /fatdrive

Thank you very much i apreciate your help... off to try it,