Hello, and greetings. Lessee.

I did get Knoppix. No question. Downloaded 699 megs to D drive. Transferred that to CD-R. Now that I think about it, I DIDN'T erase that 699 megs from D.

Restarted the machine. After info regarding chip and HDs came up, hit F8 for boot choices. Chose the CD, and went from there.

"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)" Yes, CD was in the tray. HOWEVER, when the "boot:" came up I hit "Enter" and it went from there.

Took a long time to open, finally got to the Knoppix logo which covered the screen. Along the way was a colorful page of explanations as to what it was doing.

One of those was that a partition was successful.

Opened it again. Slow. Got to a GUI desktop this time.

Opened it a third time, and got to the Knoppix logo which fills the screen, couldn't get out of that into the desktop.

When I returned to Win 2000 after that, D was gone. Not sure how much of a loss it is yet, most stuff is on C. Did lose the commercial version of Eurdora, along with numerous passwords, etc., can replace most of that OK.

I suspect, now that I type this, that leaving Knoppix on D must have contributed to the problem. And possibly hitting "Enter" at "boot:", though I was operating from the CD at that point.

Didn't go into the bios past hitting F8 to go into the boot choices menu.

I'll try to open it again in a minute and see what happens.

And what the hell. Most of the time I've taken out the only drive with an OS, and had to start over again. Usually that's been with a Norton program, either trying to get it to work or uninstall it. I've had worse problems with these things.

(I was fishing a few years ago on a small stream. Parked my truck near a bridge, worked my way upstream quite a ways, fished 'til almost dark. Worked my way down, came to the bridge, climbed up a 30 or 35 foot bank to it, and there was no road. On either end. And no car. Bridge, a nice concrete affair, two lanes wide, dropped off 8 feet at one end, and on the other ran into a 12 foot bank. "Twilight Zone" stuff for me. Walked down a trail which was an old road used for building the bridge years before, about a 1/2 mile later found the road and my car. Must have seemed like this to you.)

Arf