We bought a company recently. We moved their whole operation
to our location.

This included several Windows servers.

Upon boot, one blue-screened and refused to go any further.

We have a Windows admin (credentialed, with experience,
as much as I hate his career path, I respect him).

He was lost.

2 hours of premium M$ phone support - they said forget it,
it's toast, throw away the hard disk.

10 minutes of Knoppix boot, files full accessable, copied
off to the network.

All better.