[NTLUG:Discuss] Ubuntu to the rescue - Knoppix, too!

[kdj1@ticnet.com]

Richard Humphrey wrote:

>Today at work one of my users brought me his Thinkpad (wouldnt boot
>into Windows XP). I wasnt able to get it to even boot into safe mode,
>it would simply cycle through the boot process. We needed to get data
>off this machine before doing the famous F11 (Sytem restore) so I
>popped in the Ubuntu Live CD and away I went, After a minute or so I
>had a nice Gnome Desktop and mounted the hard drive, used Samba to
>mount to one of our File Servers and began copying data over to the
>network.
>
>I will keep this live CD with me at all times now in case of
>emergencies like this.
>
>It's nice to know Linux can pick up the slack when Windows lets you down...
>
>  
>
Same here -

I just bought a Toshiba A75-S209 in January. I had been playing with 
various distros to see which one I liked on it, when I had a puzzling 
failure - it wouldn't boot into XP anymore. During or immediately after 
loading the mouse driver, the screen blanks and then displays L 99 99 99 
99 99 99 99 99... until it fills half the screen with 99s and locks up. 
(This after an abortive install of Mandrake)

Drop Knoppix 3.6 into the CD, turn it on, and presto! I have a 
functional machine again... It automatically recognized & configured the 
USB devices (kybd, mouse, external HD) and I could just copy the entire 
XP install off to the external drive. After I got the data off, I tried 
the restore routine, but even a full reformat and restore didn't correct 
the problem.

The service center thinks the motherboard is bad, they're out of stock 
with no ETA for parts... I think they have a short in their headsets, 
but there's not much I can do about it. At least Knoppix got all my data 
off.

Dan