"Fix my PC"

I have the t-shirt, I have the sweatshirt, I have the mug - I even have the bumper sticker.  Still, I got the dreaded "Can you fix my PC - it's an emergency?!" call on Saturday morning.  Ug!  It sounded like an easy one.  A Virus was preventing the PC from booting but the kid needed to get the data.

I had them meet me at an undisclosed PC lab that I knew had good (and current) virus scanning and good VLAN isolation.  My plan was to just get the emergency data off and let them have fix the other later.  The easy solution - Knoppix!  I grabbed a copy of Knoppix 6.4.4 from St. Edward's University, Austin, TX  (Thanks SEU!) and booted up her Dell.  (It's actually getting hard to find mirror sites that have the current Knoppix - I guess because there are so many live version distros out there (but none with the utility of Knoppix)).  It auto-mounted her Windows XP partition.  Then we found the data, inserted a flash drive and copied the data.  Ta-dah!  Crisis solved.  Well, yeah, I left the real work of extracting the virus to someone else - that would've taken hours.  Besides - read the shirt/mug/bumper sticker!!!!!