While booted in knoppix or 'linux rescue' upon booting the fc1 disk1 cd try using these options in your mount command:
-o ro,errors=continue
Hopefully you will then be able to read most of your files, depending on what was in the bad sectors.
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I tried to mount the hdd with the options above but got only another error message:
"wrong filesystem, illegal options, superblock of /dev/hdb1 is damaged or too many filesystems mounted"
(I'm not sure if I've translated the error messages allright - using a German system)
I'm pretty sure it is not the "wrong filesystem" because I used -t ext2 and there aren't too many filesystems mounted. The whole command I'm trying to use is:
"mount -t ext2 -o ro,errors=continue /dev/hdb1 ~/mnt/tmp"