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????????