OK... Here's a good one....

Anyone ever come across this?

Win2k box, (AMD 1G, 256M, 20G HD, no-name video, 2 NICS, (3COM and Intel), ATAPI CD-ROM... basically a "vanilla" box), fully patched via SUS. Been fine for the two years since I generated it, (it's my work workstation.....

About a year ago someone, (trusted, though not necessarily competent), gave me a bootable Knoppix disc. I tried it once before and it failed with an error after beeing given a "Boot" prompt similar to:-

overran memory at xxxxx, unable to mount at 1.01 (or something kinda like that).

At that time I quit 'cos I was busy.

Interested in playing with something I tried again today and got the same error. So I restarted and at the boot prompt hit F2 for help.... Since "failsafe" seemed to be a "safe" option I chose it, same thing... So I gave up, removed the CD and rebooted.... It hung where it should show the progress bar and "starting windows 2000"... So I hard rebooted.... Same... ****!!!!!

I boot to the repair console from the CD and select Repair... The PC reboots.... **** again!!!! Reboot to reapir and tell it to reinstall OS over the top... It does.... Then hangs at the same place.... SOB!!!!

The dumb thing is that the drive is recognized as a viable Win2k load and the filesystem can be read.... It just won't boot, won't repair and will not alter it's boot capability after a reinstall over the top.....

My current solution is to add a drive as master, install Win2k, grab my stuff, (all extraneous but it's an installation time issue), and try a format /fixmbr....

No I don't have a backup of the entire drive since I am at a non-profit and don't have the space .... Should i have been doing ERD's more often.... yeah.... but in some ways it's a throwaway box... I just want to save myself some reinstall and patching time....

Any thoughts?

Oh.... And any idea why the Knoppix CD messed with my HD????????

sounds to me like the MBR got screwed up some how with Knoppix. Not sure how as I believe Knoopix loads everything into ram and just mounts the HD and than works from RAM. HD is still marked as read only unless you remove that option on the Configuration of Knoopix I think. Correctly me if I'm wrong, but I believe a /fixmbr should fix it.

You didn't recreated 2 partitions, one for program and OS and for OS?? That a basic concept for a computer for me.

Did you try BartPE Boot CD to get your data out?

You can try the Ultimate Boot CD also. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

"Trusted"? How trusted? Are you ruling out foul play on the part of a 3rd party? Perhaps he got that form Emule? :D

AFAIK Knoppix only scans for partitions, writes them out in /etc/fstab then proceeds loading whatever it needs. Of course that's true for Knoppix-STD and since there's been a while since I've used the 'simple' Knoppix that might not be the case. However there should be no obvious reason why Knoppix would interfere at all with you HDs, and in Knoppix 3.3 you had to mount NTFS drives with read-write access manually [not sure about 3.4].

My solution with this would be to try a[nother] LiveCD distro, like Gentoo or PHLAK and get your files out somehow. Alternatively you could remove the HD and try using it in another computer - if one is available to you.

OK... The upshot of this is that I get a new box..... :D

Basically, no matter what I did short of reformatting and reinstalling allowed me to get the thing to boot... Even a fixmbr in the recovery console did nothing.....

So, since I have to start installing all my stuff from scratch and I have been thinking about a faster box, (it's only a 1G chip), I scrounged around in the inventory we have and have now generated a 2.2G AMD/256M DDR/30G/20G/Win2k Box.... fast little bugger compared to the last one...

I have no idea what the Knoppix distro did but as I said the person who gave it to me is trusted insofar as he wouldn't try to mess with my box and probably couldn't manage it if he tried... Which is the second part of the issue... Who knows what that Knoppix distro was supposed to do???? Either way... It caused me some grief..... :(

All's well really... The box needed redoing, it needed upgrading, (45% of my users have more powerful boxes than mine was).... Also I have a second drive in the box now, (my old one) where I will be doing a nightly system state backup so this won't occur again.....

S'funny.... I can't remember how many times I tell people "Backup, backup, backup"..... LOL... Not that I lost anything.... just time.....