My XP Home software refused to boot up and kept recycling itself. Eventually I tried all various safe modes and still wouldnt work. Managed eventually to get to the Recovery Console and tried a DIR command and got an error message that an error occurred during directory enumeration.

It was suggested that I try Knoppix to see what I could do.

Knoppix has eventually allowed me to copy files onto a DVD so that is great, but I now need to sort out what is wrong.

I had a couple of problems firstly with Knoppix

1. The Burning Software had an advanced option that required a password - I didnt know this, but it didnt stop me burning the disk using a basic mode

2. Tried to copy and paste files between directories and it would not allow me to do this - I checked that the permissions of the files were Read and Write

3. When I clicked on HDA1 on the desktop I got an error message "volume is dirty forced to continue"

4. I couldnt find either of my DVD drives on the "explorer" type program, although they showed up in the burner.

Ive tried reading the FAQs on here but have not been able to sort out the various problems I had with Knoppix above.

Also someone suggested I might be able to try and repair the XP problem from within Knoppix using a program called FixNTFS or similar, but I could not find this at all or anything else suitable to try now Ive burned the dvd.

Any help would be great on any of these issues - I must admit I am impressed with Knoppix and intend when all is sorted to learn more about it on a new partition on my drive.