Friends of ours had a Windows machine stop booting - no error messages, no nothing - so they asked me to take a look at it (to the casual user, even I'm an "expert" :) ). I don't have a Windows Recovery disk handy, so I downloaded Knoppix and burned a CD. I wasn't able to fix the system (ntfsfix had no effect), but the HD is visible in Knoppix. So the good news is, our friends can boot the machine with the CD, copy the data off to a USB drive, and then reinstall - that last step should be handled by the place they bought the system from, as it's only a couple of months old.

Anyway - Knoppix is very cool - if you have system problems, it's worth a shot.

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