Recently one of my hard drives went bad (luckily not my primary one though). I did my best to get as much information off as I could but eventually my computer wouldn't even boot up with the bad hard drive hooked up. I tried all kinds of rescue boot disks and none of them could read the drive. A few of them even crashed. However, seeing my Knoppix disc on the desk gave me hope. I threw in the CD and much to my amazement it loaded successfully! Not only that, I was able to read every square inch of the disk! I'm sure some files are corrupted but getting a corrupted file is better than having the system lock up from a disk read error. Fortunately for me I had a blank hard drive I was able to format to FAT32. I wasn't very anxious to try writing to one of my healthy NTFS drives. Anyway, I'm copy the data over now so everything should be fine. Thank you Knoppix and thank you Linux!

I really like having a copy of puppy 1.06 laying around. My machine has only the one CDwriter, and with puppy, it can load itself into ram, if you follow directions, and does include a working cd burner all in that 70MB. So, IF, and it is a mighty big IF, you can boot and access a disk, you can happily write whatever you can get hold of, onto a CD as well.

Puppy 2.0x has some problems with cdrecord, though there may be other burn utilities that don't use it, but I know the iso burner uses it, and on my TEAC will not burn iso's. Puppy 2.0x also has a built in DVD burner, but I have none, so can give no opinion.

No matter, for you the problem was solved.