Quote Originally Posted by inkyfingers
Problem Solved,
Naive attempt at explanation follows.
Troblesome Machine Spec.
1997 Packard Bell iconnect 1225
WinME installed with "SmartRestore" feature presumably supported from hidden parition1.
Celeron 700MHz RAM 128MB
HD 10 GB (8 GB available to Windows)

DOS fdisk Display Partition Information
PartitionStatus Type Mbytes System Usage
1 non-DOS 1318 13%
C: 2 A Pri DOS 8456 FAT32 86%

Problem solved using Knoppix Linux 6.0.1. Original target to recover data from broken machine achieved. Thanks for the help.
And thanks to the developpers of Knoppix. It is remarkable that Knoppix runs so well on a machine of this vintage.

I think that running the Live CD on this machine is probably not optimal because, left to its own devices, Knoppix tried to use resourses out of partiton 1 which is full to the brim with M$.setup files, unknown, not FAT32, format and did not run out of partion 2 where there was loads of space.
I was reluctant to repartition this borrowed machine.
At first the cheat code tohd=/dev/hda2, simply into "unprepared Windows space" had seemed to fail.
Moreover, while I was uncertain I had achieved an effective install, the cheat code fromhd=/dev/hda2, was missed so that knoppix ran as a Live CD without my understanding.
I found I had to retry the process several times before I achieved both the copying of Knoppix files to hard drive, and the creation of space for knoppix-data.img.
However once done knoppix coexists just fine ... for a newbie.
Thanks
I've experienced some of the files copied onto the hard drive going missing with Knoppix 5; the system would automatically repair that when booting from the CD with the fromhd= cheatcode. Nice, but mysterious, as there was no reason I know for the loss (and it wasn't an NTFS partition, so the known problems with that version's NTFS access.