On the promised grimmer side, from my point of view, I think Knoppix has taken out my D drive. When I first booted from the CD it mentioned it had successfully partitioned a drive.

Are you sure you got knoppix and not something else? I don't even think it is possible to do that from the knoppix command line. at bootup

I didn't know what that meant, thought it might have downloaded some stuff and kept it away from the Windows environment. All I did was tell the computer to boot from the CD, and it did the rest all by itself. Didn't tell it to install.

OK, Bowser, how did you tell it to "boot from the cd"?

did you restart the computer with the knoppix cd in the tray?
if so, and you got a little screen that said 'boot:' what did you type it? (tell me as close to exact as you can)

did you go into the bios while booting at all?

did you 'tell it to boot from the cd while in windows' somehow?

What ever happened I'll try to replicate it with knoppix.

It ran normally once, but slowly, from the CD. And now I can't get at the programs on D, instead get a message that the drive hasn't been formatted and asking if I'd like to do that.

And I think I've read that if a drive is re-partitioned the information is gone, history, has disappeared into the cosmos. May as well reformat it.

Do you know if that's true, or maybe et does?

Well yes, it sounds like you have a repartitioned hardrive to me. . . that means that yes, everything is gone.

This sounds incredibly wierd too, not quite sure how you managed to pull it off.. . . ist like finding a 55 chevy stuck in a tree. . . . "how the heck did that happen?"

-Justin Kelly