For those of you who'll recall, I've been playing around with the Mepis CD for a little while now on my spare computer. Last night I booted Mepis up again...I hadn't booted that computer up in a while. I found that my second hard drive (the spare computer has three) couldn't "mount" in Mepis...and I hadn't had any problems with it before. I removed the Mepis CD to try and boot in WindowsME, and I received a "blue-screen" message:

WHILE INITIALIZING DEVICE SHELL:
Cannot find or load required file KRNL386.EXE. The file was not found.

System Halted.

Apparently, the second hard drive is also my WindowsME drive. What happened? Is it possible Mepis did something to my Windows Kernel and/or Hard Drive, even though it was run as a live CD? Has anyone encountered anything like this before? I'm about to load up Mepis again to check myself, but just in case I can't find it: Does Mepis have its own version of hard disk diagnosis/repair tools?

I'd appreciate any help anyone has to offer. THANKS!

Live CD's don't do anything to your hard drive. They are maily for testing linux. The problem might just be the "windows" factor. The filesystem might be corroupt. Try Booting into safe mode, or the setup cd, and running chkdsk, that sould fix any hard drive problems, but if yoru computer dosn't work after that, its not linux's fault!