help needed re knoppix 5.1.1 cd

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Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman

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Originally Posted by darcykahle

... I am wondering if some patch (or the SP2) "fixed" things to allow only booting from the HD.
needless to say, this is getting frustrating.

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I can't imagine how it could do that. I could believe that malware (microsoft, or even some nasty rootkit that didn't want you to be able to find and remove it) could change the BIOS to prevent you from booting anything else. But it would be pretty hard to come up with anything that anticipated the SBM boot code and defeated it too, as well as blocking booting and even looking at the Linux CD, but still let you access other CDs on the drive.

Please keep us posted about what you learn.

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I decided to roll back the patches and SP2, to try and resolve this. Late last night, after a long and stressfull period of uninstalling the patches, I decided to call it a night. Before I did so, I tested the booting of the knoppix cds, and I was able to boot knoppix 5.0.1, though 5.1.1 still was not seen as a bootable cd. One of the "patches" that I uninstalled had something to do with DRM, and I suspect that that might have been the culprit for that. I have since uninstalled SP2, and I still can not view the cds from within windows (the cd icon shows it as a cd-r disk, and accessing it gives "D:\ is not accessible: Incorrect Function")

At least now I can boot to 5.0.1. The new cd is viewable under my linux box, so I think that the cd is fine. (I will not be trying to boot the cd on that box, though - it is running something, and I shouldn't reboot it just to test the cd.) I will pursue the "Incorrect Function" error further. Hopefully, if I resolve that, I will be able to use the 5.1.1 cd on my laptop.

Thanks for your help.

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Originally Posted by darcykahle

I decided to roll back the patches and SP2, to try and resolve this......

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I don't see how the patches/sp2 can be rolled back and somehow that let you boot the CD. Remember, Windows isn't running when Knoppix boots. And I'll assume that you have tried this booting from a cold boot so that it's not an issue of what state xp has the system currently in. Look at it this way: What if you removed the hard drive from the computer, could Knoppix boot then? If not, then rolling back some patches can't do any more than removing the hard drive. (on the other hand, if removing the hard drive does help then there is something going on that is not being said, since it should not help, as no software from the HD should be used in a CD boot). I've been thinking you might be in a situation like I believe I was where something from MS modified eeprom in your computer. A patch rollback will not correct that.

Since it seems to have had some effect, something else is going on.

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Originally Posted by darcykahle

The new cd is viewable under my linux box, so I think that the cd is fine.

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This is not a valid test of a bootable CD. There are multiple reasons for this: Two of them are that what you are viewing from Linux does not include the boot portion of the CD at all (it might not even be there, which is the case when some dolt decides to extract "everything" from an ISO and them write those files to a CD). And viewing from a running system can include a lot of error correction/recovery (a 700 meg cd is actually around 800 megs if you include all of the extra error recovery data). Apparently, from the problems that we have seen from high speed burns, the boot process can't use this error recovery data to get a good boot, it requires that the disk be error free while booting.