Alright! Windows stopped responding to me, my hard drive is dying, but thanks to everything I learned back on my Second Coop with ACES at Sheridan I learned about Knoppix, hell any linux live on CD would've saved my ass here.

I was able to boot up my computer and backup everything to my servers. So yeah, I'm doing this from Knoppix right now.

So...any other close shave stories?

Knoppix has helped me soooo many times in the past. Especially when I'm using the Encrypted File System (EFS) thingy in XP. My computer crashed and I had to reinstall XP on top of it, and Windows locked me out of the EFS folder where all my unbacked up projects were. According to the Microsoft-minded people, there is no way to get the files out. No software, no hack, no cracker or anything. It's a little know fact to the MCP that Knoppix can open the folder as if it wasn't encrypted at all. So I just boot up with live cd and copy the files to a different part of the hard drive.

Knoppix is an essential tool in any tech's kit.

I accidently screwed up my partition table when attempting an initial install of Windows after first building a new computer. The hard drive was from my old computer and obviously had data I wanted to preserve. Anyway it would not boot and no Windows boot disk could even see that there was a drive there. Enter in good ol' Mandrake. It wasn't a live disk but I did have enough space to install Mandrake. It saw everything right off the bat. I was able to do a quick install of Mandrake and was able to back up most of my data to a different drive. I believe I only lost a couple of hundred megs. (The drive I was backing up to was quite a bit smaller then the drive I was reading from.) From that point I used Mandrake to wipe the partition table clean and then used Windows to rebuild with the configuration that I wanted. Everything worked excellently from there.

I've lost count of how many OS's I've killed at 50, or so. A redundant OS, and data hard drive back-up is now part of any machine I build. I still like to load XP Pro manually though, just for fun.

I've had a close shave when the X-Server of one of my machines stopped responding and refused to start. On this particular machine I would have GDM run the graphical login, but it instead gave me the X-Server error claiming it had something to do with fonts. I logged in on the terminal and saw no problem with the fonts, so I used apt-get (I had been using a Deb-like OS) to reinstall all of the X-Server. I noticed that there were more problems, as it wouldn't let me burn anything either and a lot of the devices wouldn't respond. I eventually found out that the problem was that an earlier update on the X-Server didn't like the changes I had made to the kernel after a recompile not long before that.

At first I had thought of scrapping it all since I didn't back up the kernel when I updated, but I instead went through a nice long session of compiling and recompiling until I figured it out and got it all settled in the end.

Unfortunately I've since given that computer away and they just formatted my personally much edited kernel into a Windows ME machine...*shudders*