How to use a Knoppix live CD on a crashed computer?

[dealrocker]

My computer has crashed recently and I need to recover some data from it. I am using Knoppix live CD to boot my computer. I have already entered the command in the BIOS menu to boot from CD, but nothing happens and windows tries to boot up. Just trying to figure out what am I doing wrong and how have others done it?
Please help..

[Clinton]

Where did you get the CD? If it's one you've created yourself have you followed the instructions in our documentation to the letter?

[mejohnsn]

A next natural step would be to try booting from either the Network or from a USB flash drive. That will help isolate whether the problem really is isolated to the CD drive or not.

Google 'netbootin' to get a handy utility for taking almost any LiveCD image and making a bootable USB stick out of it. I am running a Knoppix LiveCD on the USB stick right now, made using netbootin.

Of course, you will have to run this on another machine: you can either use an ISO image you have downloaded separately (as I did) or connect directly to certain distributions and download the latest from their repository.