Mike McCarty wrote:
Anyway, unless I want to make a hobby of making that machine able to boot Debian, and fiddling with it just to see if it could have been made to work, I'm afraid Debian is pretty much gone on this machine. Even if I make the machine dual boot, I wonder just how often it actually would get booted to Debian. Her plan is to use Knoppix to move her mail files etc. from the Debian partition to an external FAT drive, and then reboot Windows and import.
If the debian install used ext2/3 then there is a driver for windows XP (http://www.fs-driver.org/) which will allow direct access to the partitions without the need to boot a live CD.
HTH Wackojacko
Mike