Linux Live CD to the Rescue . . . Somewhat

[Mark Jarvis]

A not too computer savvy friend called today--her Windows box wouldn't 
boot beyond scandisk--where it stopped with a permanent disk errors 
message. I booted from first Ubuntu, them Simply Mepis Live CDs. Both 
hung at about the point where they should have brought up the GUI login 
screen. Tried again with Mepis, guessing that appending a "1" to the 
boot line would boot it into single user mode and avoid the endless 
loop. It worked, but working with tiny blue letters on a black 
background was not my idea of fun. (Next time I start with Knoppix.) 
After much searching, we found the most critical files and copied them 
to floppies. So, partial success!  Friend was VERY glad to save those 
files!!

Anybody have similar experiences with live CDs hanging due to partially 
bad disk and/or a good explanation? I assume it was the auto detect, 
check, and mount that was the problem, but . . .

-mj-