Never seen this before.. Have you?

FUBAR.

How did you lose the menu to begin with?

My guess is that it's displaying the area on disk that contains text error read outs for what boot error is happening, like on Windows it will show "NTLDR missing" or something to that effect. However, you have somehow corrupted this part of the disk where the error text to display resides and is now displaying the garbage that currently occupies the area.

After reading over your situation, I really think your best bet is to stop trying to repair a significantly hobbled system and just re-do everything. Boot up into Knoppix again and save all your data to an external drive and re-do the system - preferably with a dedicated hard drive for each OS since you aren't too familiar with maintaining a dual-boot system on one drive. However, if you do decide to do dual-boot again, make sure you install Windows first and then Linux.

FliGi7 said:

After reading over your situation, I really think your best bet is to stop trying to repair a significantly hobbled system and just re-do everything. Boot up into Knoppix again and save all your data to an external drive and re-do the system - preferably with a dedicated hard drive for each OS since you aren't too familiar with maintaining a dual-boot system on one drive. However, if you do decide to do dual-boot again, make sure you install Windows first and then Linux.

I concur. Even if a repair was possible, it would leave the door open for problems.

I think that's what you've been trying to figure out and you're seeing how long it is taking to even find it out, let alone fix it. When a drive becomes maimed to the point of not even being able to give error messages, there's not a lot of hope left for a repair. And, even if you did eventually figure it out and get it to boot, you don't know what else you have corrupted that could later lead to more problems.

I've been down this road of wanting a solution, and trying many, at any cost, and I've lost important data because of it. I can only advise that you don't do the same and concede to the fact that sometimes you're just not going to have an answer to what or why things happened at such a low level corruption like this, unless you have a lot of time and energy to spend pursuing it (which you might).