Playing with Linux
 

I've been playing w/linux live cds some. Knoppix 3.7, 4.0 and Ubuntu 5.10 breezy badger. Someone told me 4.0 doesn't do USB, mine did I guess, my mouse & kbd. are usb. But then caught an error and never finished loading. Am burning a new copy of .iso at slower speed. Also dwnloading the dvd .iso I hope? Here are links about repairing windows w/linux. Read close because I think there's a bug when you have NTFS.
http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1918391,00.asp.
Bigv posted about using VPC so I thought I would throw this out.

Yes,

according to that article, there are bugs with the way NTFS is handled because "captive NTFS" aka using the Windows DLLs didn't work as reliably as expected.

I personally won't use Knoppix to fix a broken Windows installation. I'll use Bart's PE or ERD Commander, both of which boot to a minimal Windows installation (XP in the case of Bart's PE). You can even install drivers in Bart's PE for things like RAID and SAN controllers, and bring a Proliant server up on the network even after it's down to do work.

In case you're wondering, it's a customizable Windows installation which uses your existing CDs and a group of plugins and drivers to make the recovery experience much less painful.

Knoppix is perfectly fine for doing Linux-based work, but if you have to fix a Windows installation, I'll recommend Bart's PE to anyone, as it uses Windows itself. Having a 250GB FAT32 partition is asking for trouble.

Mitch