Well, none of those worked (could not open/not found/cant write errors), however oddly enough, through some miracle I recieved a different result once I tried to restart the computer again without knoppix. I thought the messages were a little weird, and looked at the bios settings again to see if anything was funky there. Previously everything looked perfectly fine, though now the master wasnt detected, so I entered in all the info needed and tried to restart again, and wouldn't you know it, it worked. It's still running notoriously slow and making the occasional weird noises that sound like something's very close to being fried, but it works well enough for him to back up all his data in case anything like this happens again.

Of course, knowing his luck I'll be back there very soon with a similar problem.

Ah well, thanks for the help anyways, just thought I'd follow up on that one.