Quote Originally Posted by winxpuser50 View Post
I hope I'm not intruding but I'm new to Knoppix, just had my Win XP system fail to boot, nothing worked, (safe mode, all the usual fixes) so I just today bought a CD of Knoppix and hope it will get me into my system and past the boot problem. Obviously a file(s) is corrupted. I looked a various boot utilities that claim to do this and that but several tech people advised me to try Knoppix as perhaps I can transfer my files to my external drive before working on the system further or heaven forbid having to do a full restore using the Toshiba "recovery" disc (which I thought was a reboot disc, but nooooooooooo ,it wipes the whole system). I'll also keep Hiren's Boot CD in mind if Knoppix doesn't work....I want to be able to fix what's wrong but not sure if Knoppix will let me do that....I'm not a total newb but never tried anything like this so I'm out there if anyone wants to share problems or issues. Thanks!
Welcome aboard! Knoppix can certainly help you back up in many cases - a well-advised first step on the road to repair. Have you tried booting it yet? Keep in mind that you may need to change a BIOS setting to get the CD/DVD to boot, regardless of what it has on it.

The file manager (big file folder icon on the toolbar, bottom left side) can help you mount both your original hard drive and a USB disk/flash drive, then copy what you want to your external drive (or even the web.) One thing that's kind-o' different here is that Windows will generally auto-mount any drive in sight, while Knoppix, and Linux in general, will wait to be told to mount in most cases.

Copy-and-paste is much the same in both systems, so no worries there. Now, what to do with the busted Windows partition? Depends on what you find. Let us know if you need help.

Hope this helps!
Krishna