I remember also hosing the bootloader somehow on my first try of Linux, luckily my personal desktop so no collatoral damage!

After that I always had a CD wallet thing with copies of sysresccd and supergrubdisk and others (including I think an old knoppix cd from a linux magazine).

Similar story here.

When I first started going towards Linux I tried, in this order:

* Puppy linux, because I liked puppies.

* College linux, because it was for education, and I was in secondary school, and college sounded fancy.

* Adriane Knoppix, because it's what came up when you did a web search for "knoppix download" -- that was interesting, if you didn't know, ADRIANE is for blind people.

* Whoppix (which became Whax) -- because I could actually find the download.

* Backtrack linux (because that was apparently better than WHAX)

* Slackware, because backtrack was based on this and "only script kiddies use Backtrack".

I did the same as you, tried to keep things to liveCDs but I always got the urge to install them, so would do it periodically until everything broke. This also meant I had to deal with whatever was broken (usually wifi).

One thing I remember very fondly though, which isn't a linux, is the leaked Geek Squad rescue CD... I'd give a decent chunk of change for an updated one of those..