Scrambled Screen - Compaq Presario 5300US Desktop

[woodjack]

I'm a newbie and Ive been having problems with my screen being scrambled. The CD boots up only when I used the 'failsafe' cheat code. If I don't use 'failsafe', I get the following:

Can't find KNOPPIX filesytem, sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press resume button to quit

The 'failsafe' code allows the CD to boot up, however, the monitor is always scrambled. I've tried changing the monitor settings via 'knoppix vga=normal' and others such as 'screen=1280x1024', and these only change the size of my screen, but its still scrambled. I've also tried Cntl-Alt-+ and Cntl-Alt-- to try and change the screen size on the fly, but no luck there either. My graphics card is a 'Direct AGP 3D Graphics' I believe.

Also, I think I'm using multiple cheat codes correctly, just putting a space between cheat codes, but sometime it seems to not recognize anything but 'failsafe', which I always put first.

Does anyone have any suggestions to get me passed this problem? I'm desperately trying to save data on my desktop, where Windows XP won't boot-up due to a virus.

Thanks,

[rusty]

I've had similar problems on old compaqs. I had some luck with overclockix 3.2 and knoppic std, although I'm not sure these woill be of much help with recovering xp data.

See if you can get kanotix http://kanotix.com/info/index.php and try some of the cheat codes on it. Also you might try a different monitor or pulling the hd out of the compaq and putting it in a newer machine to work on it.

HTH

[woodjack]

Thanks you all for your suggestions. I eventually ran into the following cheat-code combination that worked for me:

Knoppix vga=normal screen=1024x768 vsync=60 nosmc nodma