alt Hacker NewsI had knoppix running at the time. It was my first experience of a Live CD. which was cool as I could run it I'm sure it was a pentium 100 with 16meg and 800MB hdd. or maybe it was later on my Pentium II with 128Meg and 6.4GB Fireball!
Either way I used it a good few times to rescue data and generally fiddle with all sort of pcs from this era. (late 90's to early 2000')
Same. Back then we weren't booting off USB memory sticks: CDs it was. Knoppix and memtest to troubleshoot friends and family's PCs were my go-to tools. Always had a few bootable CD roms in the car. Heck I'd even take a HDD with me and wouldn't hesitate to open other people's PC and hook my "rescue HDD".
Worst memory ever troubleshooting a friend's PC was in the 386 or 486 days (didn't have Knoppix yet but was already on Slackware): he asked me to backup his files and I hooked one of my HDD as the main (as it was booting fine) and hooked my friend's HDD as a "slave" (that's how the terminology was back then). But I got sloppy and just let my friend's HDD sitting on the tower. Metallic PC tower. I turned the computer on, we heard an horrible noise and we saw a puff of smoke.
Old HDDs were kinda wild from that standpoint: much more exposed conductive parts than the later ones.
I just managed to short-circuit his HDD and it, nearly literally, went up in smoke. I was feeling really bad and gave him a HDD of mine. Oh well at least he had a working computer (but zero files of his).