Greetings all,
The company for which I work has a bunch of Dell laptops with WIN98. On one of these laptops, the hard drive is screwed. It is possibly a hardware failure, but I'm not sure about that. Dell is sending another HD, but I need to try and retreive some important files from the old HD.

I'm using Knoppix to boot the machine and I'm trying to mount the drive, but apparently Linux is having a hard time reading the drive as well.

Does anyone know of any Linux software that I could run after booting with Knoppix that might allow me to do some repair of the drive--enough repair to copy the files I need to save.
Any help greatly appreciated and TIA,
Jim A.

You best chance is probably to "dd" the drive's contents to a file another drive then mount the file as a loop device.

David,
Thanks for your quick response. I'm sorry but you lost me. What is "DD" the drive? If I can get to the files, I'm going to copy them to our server. The files are all *.doc files and *.txt files.
Thanks again,
Jim

Try typing this a command line:

man dd
or
info dd

Should tell you everything you could ever want to know about dd.

there is another version of dd that continues after errors. I cannot recall its name at the moment.
But, if its a company thing send the hard drive to a data recovery firm. If you are posting stuff like 'what exectly is dd' a data recovery firm sounds quicker and maybe more apt.