My Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop boots ok with the wary-5.5 burned CD, but I cannot figure out how to see if there are any and hopefully recoverable files on the internal harddrive. Booting from it is no longer possible. Thanks in advance for your help!

Problem solved!

Since you are new to linux, I would suggest you look at this link -->https://www.howtoforge.com/ntfs-disk-recovery

This should help you out recovering data from your windows ??? ( you didn't say ) system.

Basically you will need to boot the system with Puppy, or what ever live CD you choose. Get root privileges, this varies with live systems, so you may have to look at Puppy doc for an answer here.

As root, create a mount point in the linux file system. Done with the mkdir command.

Then as root mount the harddrive partition to the mount point. Once mounted, you can copy files to another media, such as a flash drive. This is the big picture, you will need to do some reading to find the details.

Hope this helps.

1 members found this post helpful.

Puppy and other instruction help.

10 page Puppy thread with the rest of the info you may need or not know.

Reading your post. If bios does not see your hard drive.
It is a coaster or trout line sinker now. In other words.
Maybe broken.

1 members found this post helpful.

Welcome aboard.

(Good luck.)