Quote Originally Posted by darcykahle
I decided to roll back the patches and SP2, to try and resolve this......
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.

Quote Originally Posted by darcykahle
The new cd is viewable under my linux box, so I think that the cd is fine.
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.