Update: Knoppix doesn't boot. At a certain point it says : Cannot unite read-only media and initial ramdisk - shutdown hda - system halted.

Then I get a few read errors on the cd-rom for some reason (even though I'm 100% sure the CD is ok). And finally it ends in : no filesystem could mount root, tried reiserfs, ext3, ext2, msdos, vfat, iso9660, fudseblk. Kernel panic - not synching : VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block (1,3)

Then the system halts.

I guess I'll give llow level formating another try. But if that doesn't work, I guess the hd's are FUBAR'd.