my C drive on DELL WinXP machine went belly up. It won't boot with
error message "corrupt hal.dll" or some such thing. Went to windows
repair recovery console - can't even get directory listing of drive.
"error in directory enumeration". Tried chkdsk -p, it gave up 30% in
with unrecoverable errors.


Downloaded knoppix and inserted that cd and booted up. I can see all my
folders but "my documents" is locked up (I must have accidentally
protected it in windows). This folder is listed as ?----- in 'ls -l'
while others appear as 'drwxrwxrwx'. I can see other users' "my
documents". Also I see that this drive is full - don't know how this
happened as I had a good chunk of the 30GB drive as unused. I couldn't
mount this drive read/write in linux and hence I tried another
strategy.

I downloaded Ultimate Boot CD for windows and booted off of it. It can
see my second driver as valid NTFS but for C: it says (unrecognized). I
then used testDisk utility and it saw the two partitions on primary
drive. a 30Mb FAT16 that has DELL utilities and the remaining ~28Gb
NTFS. I then used the "Write" option to write what it found to back to
disk. I then restarted UBCD. Now it finds the FAT16 and assigns letter
C to it and then the second NTFS partition appears as Funrecognized).
This has all my files. I tried the testDisk repair a couple of more
times - no luck. While in testDisk I can list the files in several
folders and they all look fine and when it came to "my documents" it
hangs on those protected files. I would appreciate any help copying
those files to the second NTFS drive.

thanks
SS