fond memories of Knoppix! Was so useful to boot into that to debug, investigate, fix.

GRML is a successor of sorts to Knoppix: https://grml.org/

It's an Austrian LiveCD based on Debian; version 2024.02 was just released. It's not as slick as Knoppix, but it does come with lots of utilities and can start an X Windows desktop.

20 years ago mounting NTFS read/write on Linux was a risky proposition.

You could use ntfs.sys with some wrapper, can't remember. It was almost safe.