Knoppix Live CD not working

[dink73]

Hi

I am a total newbie to all this but as I have an unmountable boot volume error on my old Time 10yr old pc upstairs an IT friend suggested using Knoppix to try and get into my hard drive to retrieve my files. I made a cd last night and we booted it on to the pc, it all loaded but wouldn't work so we gave up (it kept initiating shutdown).

This mornign I tried again and it worked.

I know have the Knoppix desktop and tray icons but have no idea what to do with them! I phoned my IT friend who directed me to where my files would be but it wouldn't let me in (some error message that I can't remember now). The only thing on the Knoppix desktop is a house icon with desktop underneath. When you click on that it takes you into the folder which says no sub folder.

When I fist went in I could see a menu to the left that sais New Volume and 36.3 Gb Volume but I can't see that now (stuck in File System). When I clicked on the New Volume drive which is my external USB drive and I can see all my stored files on there but there was another icon called somthing like 36.3 GB Volume and it wouldn't let me in - is that my hard drive from the old pc?

Not sure what to do now. My IT friend wasn't sure and he was at work so couldn't help futher. I've left it on my pc as I daren't shut it down in case it won't load again. Any advice? I've come so far so i hope I can retrieve something.

Thanks

[rev_dav]

Hi

I made a cd last night and we booted it on to the pc, it all loaded but wouldn't work so we gave up (it kept initiating shutdown).

This mornign I tried again and it worked.

Hi dink73,

I presume you downloaded an .iso image of the Knoppix; you need to do the md5 checksum test on it before using it.

If it passes that test then my next suspicion would be that your cdrom drive might be faulty or dirty; try it in another pc.

But given that you get intermittent results from both Windows and Knoppix there could be something wrong with another part of the pc apart from the drives.

HTH,
David