[PLUG] knoppix on wacky Dell laptop

[Russell Senior]

I helped a neighbor recover some files from a w2k dell laptop (800MHz
P3 era) this evening and had some strange experiences.  His windows
behavior was perpetual blue screen followed by reboot followed by blue
screen, etc.  Under knoppix (3.7), I could not get X11 to fully load,
it would freeze on a splash screen, so I eventually punted back to a
tty (runlevel 2) boot.  I also tried a Ubuntu live-CD (not the newest
one) with similar results.  Whenever I tried to rsync or cp -a files
from the hard disk, the kernel panic'd.  This occured with both kernel
2.4 and 2.6.  It occurred both when I was rsyncing across the network
and when I was writing to a jumpdrive.  If it was only the hard disk
that was faulty, I would have expected to just get I/O errors, not a
panic.  I was able to copy several individual files successfully.

He had called Dell today, and they talked him through a partial
disassembly, and a windows tech guy came by and didn't have an answer
either.

Does this sound like just a bum disk to you?  Or something more
serious?  

I probably should have run memtest86 while I was there, but he was
more interested in recovering the files he had worked on since his
last backup (luckily he had incrementals up to just under a day ago)
than in diagnosing what went wrong.


-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com