Ran Knoppix - now win2K won't startup

[rchinoy]

I'm a total Knoppix/Linux noob, so please bear with me. I have a Win2K machine with NTFS on RAID 0 (two drives). I ran the Knoppix 3.3 CD for the first time last night, and now Win2K will not startup properly. It gets through the text and graphical mode startup screens, even plays the startup music, but then the machine hangs while it's populating the taskbar with Quick Launch icons, sometimes displaying a small dialog box that says "Unknown hard error". The only thing I did in Knoppix that now has me worried is I created (and saved) a test file in the OpenOffice word processor. I have to admit, I was a little mystified as to WHERE it saved it since I thought Knoppix wouldn't write to my HD. Now it seems that I hosed my system.

What can I do to correct this?

Thanks,
Russ Chinoy

[firebyrd10]

Well it probably saved it to the knoppix home directory. Unless you change the read/write privlages of knoppix you coudn't of saved it. and with you being a newbie chances are that you didn't tell it to enable writing to a NTFS file system.

Its probably just chance that it happened after you used knoopix. What kind of RAID config are you useing? if its (I think) RAID config 1 (which is where one dirve exactly mirrors the main drive) then take one of the drive out and try booting up (after undoing the RAID of course) Its probably a hardware rather then software problem.

[rchinoy]

Actually, it's RAID 0, which is striping rather than mirroring. I can't imagine this is just coincidental. If I inadvertently mounted the drive and did write to it, what can I do to fix it?

[firebyrd10]

I'm not sure you can fix it really.

Anyway by default when you mount a drive from KDE it won't let you write. And even if you try to change the settings with a NTFS drive in KDE it will give you an error saying that it won't do it because it might curropt the drive. You'd have to manually change the settings.

If you are having troubles then you may want to back up files then re install windows. but thats just the last resort.

[rchinoy]

So when I saw my test.doc file on the KDE desktop, where was it being stored?

[OErjan]

on a ramdisk, that is a "virtual" disk made up from a part of your ram.

[firebyrd10]

exactly.

Knoppix makes a virtual hardrive out of your ram so it has something to load the software into. If you just saw it on your desktop and thats the only thing you saved then chances are that this problem happened purly by chance.