I have a pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 1G ram, 80G (crashed) hard drive, on board video and sound. I have a CD burner and a separate DVD player.

I'm booting knoppix from the DVD drive so I can use the CD burner to try and salvage data.

here is my problem: no matter what boot mode, or cheat codes I use, (following the tips and tricks in cheat codes) I can get to the desktop (a picture of mountains). At the bottom of the screen I see what appears to be a toolbar. When the mouse is working I can scroll to the far left and get a hand. Eventually the whole thing freezes up and I never get the entire desktop or any functionality.

Does knoppix try to load from the hard drive? If so is it possible to boot without use of the hard drive? Could this be a bad CD burn? (I did have a bad one and went back and read the FAQ and reburned it at the slowest possible speed using NERO.) I downloaded using bittorent and checked the MD5 using quickpar. Everything appears kosher as far as that goes.

Thanks for any help,

Stuck in the mountains.