Quote Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman
Quote 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.
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.
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.