A colleague of mine has a Dell laptop that she uses for her other job as a security manager. On trying it one day recently it started the Windows XP loading screen and then went straight to the blue screen of death with an "Unmountable_Boot_Manager" Message. Nothing was working not even safe mode.
To double the stress, none of the important files had been backed up either. In an attempt to recover files before trying any kind of troubleshooting I plugged in a USB Hard Disk and searched my Linux Library to see if I had any suitable tools....Thus I saw Knoppix....and it was good.........
Knoppix, for those not familiar, is a Live Linux distribution that runs entirely from CD (or DVD) and comes chock full of Applications and tools and most importantly is FREE. I was expecting to have to use a little known tool (included in Knoppix) called PhotoRec that recovers files from damaged drives by piecing them back together at byte level (and from previous experience, works incredibly well).
However, on attempting to mount the dodgy drive the Linux system flashed up a message that the drive was damaged and then attempted to mount the "dirty" drive (Knoppix's words....). Konqueror then popped up displaying all the files on the disk and I was able to copy and paste them to the USB Hard Disk.
If you have an internet connection just go to www.knoppix.org and download a copy, it really is an essential tool. I know I could probably have used other distributions (Ultimate Boot CD, System Rescue CD, MEPIS, Ubuntu) but Knoppix seems to do it all.
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