A friend told me of Knoppix and that it can be used to help salvage my drive. Being new to Linux, I have read a lot on the other threads pertaining to this issue but have not been able to find a solution (could be I just missed it.)

I have a Celeron 2.9 with 2 Gb ram with a Radeon card.

Initially hung immediately at the Starting udev... message. Read about burning slower and tried that. Got a little further than that when reburned (x8 was slowest option.)

Recieved several error messages then.
First one was: udevd-event[2666]: run_program: '/sbin/modprobe' abnormal exit

This error message was followed by about another 10 messages saying the same thing with failed at the end (and different event numbers.)

I have tried:

1. boot: knoppix vga=0
2. boot: knoppix acpi=off pnpbios=off noapic noapm Helpful for laptops
3. boot: knoppix vga=0 debug -b 3 Using this boot command will cause Knoppix to pause at various stages in the boot process. Just type 'exit' at each shell prompt to move on to the next stage. You will know that you are at the final stage when typing 'exit' does not do anything. If you get that far, type 'init 5' to go into graphics mode.
4. boot: failsafe debug -b 3 That will do the same as the previous boot command, except turn off most of the hardware detection.

All of these methods hung at the "Starting udev....." message.

Don't know if its relevent or not but when #3 and #4 hung, the caps lock indicator and the scroll lock indicator were flashing.

These were the commands given in the tips & tricks area about failure to boot at http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Cheat_Codes

Has anyone come up with a solution or am I SOL on saving any of my data off the drive????


darrmik