I was playing around with the multitudinous desktop manager options in knoppix 5.01. I was trying some I had never heard of when the system completely locked up on me. So I powered down. It happened again (doh, went to that same desktop) so I powered down again.

THEN I was getting that error 16 which according to google is about bad HDD configuration or GRUB corruption.

I booted up a live CD and apparently am able to copy the files off the HDD, so I am doing it now with k3b.

Any tips on how to fix, or is a reinstall of something required?

TIA

It sounds like you somehow messed up your mbr so you could try
where hdX is your hdd, eg hda.
If that doesn't work you may need to look at /boot/grub/menu.lst for grub's settings.

Okay, thanks, but like how would this be done. I cannot really get to linux, per se.

You say you can get into the live CD, dose it have a rescue mode? Or just run the commands from a term in the rescue CD. If you need to look at /boot/grub/menu.lst make sure you mount the HDD first.