Knoppix saved XP

[chone]

I'd like to start this story by saying that the guys behind Knoppix have done a fantastic job, for which I'm very grateful.

My wife's notebook, an HP with XP, stopped working. Something happened to the machine that kept it in an endless restart loop: boot, load, reset, boot,... First I was affraid of a hard disk crash, but then I ran a BIOS hard disk check that told me the HD was OK.

I tried all XP options: safe mode, debug mode, last known good, etc. None of them were effective: they all ended rebooting the machine apparently at the same point. The Recovery Console was of no use either: you can only access the WINDOWS directory and I needed data saved somewhere else.
Reluctantly, I tried to reinstall XP. The installation program recognized the previous installation, but it stopped along the way for no apparent reason. I tried the same procedure again with the same unwanted results.
I needed to save my wife's data, so I knew I had 2 options: either boot the notebook with an OS that could access NTFS and have network access or take out the HD and somehow connect it to my PC to retrieve the data. I didn't want to mess with hardware, so that would be my last resource.

I went online but, as you all know, you have to ask cleverly to have Google perform its magic. Since my PC background is rooted in MS OSes, I hoped someone had written a DOS program that could access NTFS. And there are a few! (see NTFS4DOS: http://www.datapol.de/dpe/freeware/). I could finally see my wife's files... But they were still locked inside the notebook. Even though I found a universal tcp/ip network boot disk (http://www.netbootdisk.com/) it didn't work (probably because something I did wrong). Also I found a lot of handy tools at http://www.bootdisk.com/.
In my search, I ran accross a web site that mentioned Knoppix. I was not aware of Live-CDs, but they made a lot of sense. I visited the Knoppix site but the ISO files were too large for dial-up download. It was almost 3:00 am and I had to wait until next morning when I would download the files using a faster connection at the office. Once I made the CD, I tried it on a PC and I was amazed for what I saw.

When I got home, I booted the notebook with Knoppix: boot, hardware discovey and driver installation, graphic interfase, everything ready in no time!!! When I wanted to connect to my PC, I discovered that the network card was not installed. I'm not afraid of the command line interface, but I'm not familiar with the commands and switches, so installing the card first and mounting the samba share would have taken me a lot of time. But Knoppix had graphical tools for both tasks and soon I was transferring the files to my PC over the network.

Once the data was backep up, I clean reinstalled XP by performing a HD format. This time the XP installation went smoothly. When finished, I restored the data and the notebook was ready again.

Simply put, the "humble" penguin saved the mighty XP with style. Knoppix is just great! In fact, it should change the "From 0 to Linux in 5 minutes" to "From 0 to Linux in UNDER 5 minutes".

Congratulations to the guys behind Knoppix and thanks a lot!

[Phantom187]

Knoppix saved my sisters computer from the trash can