Our good friend, Knoppix STD proved to be a great asset to any PC-troubleshooter’s toolbox the other day.
Jenn’s aunt’s Windows XP machine wouldn’t boot to anything but a lovely BSoD with an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error and scores of numbers strewn about the screen. I was worried a bit at first that the disk was corrupted and all the data was gone, because I had never seen this particular error before.
Armed with my trusty Knoppix STD disk, I booted into Linux and first tried mounting the problem-drive to see just how bad the problem was. It mounted, and all the files showed up with what seemed like no problem. So I got to a Fluxbox shell, fired up Firefox, and Googled the problem (hint: this means the network card was autodetected and DHCP got me on the router with nary-a-command). I got to a Microsoft page that offered a possible solution: boot from the XP disc, drop to the Recovery Console (by pressing ‘R’), run chkdsk /r, and reboot. I did so. Lo-and-behold, the glorious (blech!) Windows XP boot screen came up and the system booted normally.
OK, so maybe I owe some credit to the Windows XP disc but Knoppix certainly was useful!
