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System Recovery with Knoppix
An anonymous reader writes "This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line."
At the very least it never ceases to amaze the windows geeks.
Why don't you use Windows Emergency Repair disks, you GNU hippies? Or fine CD-ROM support that comes with Windows(r) Recovery Console?
Many people in my Windows-based office walk past my Gentoo desktop, wondering what I'm running. When they see how well it works (no viruses, no reboots, lots of tools available), they want to know how hard it is to install. Of course, Gentoo is not for the beginner. But, I've been handing out Knoppix CDs left and right. People love it!
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
SuSE also has a live CD, which is pretty good (IMHO) the KDE desktop is a little more polished than Knoppix. Cant say I used either as a full time desktop thou, so not sure how they rank. And couldnt get the Gentoo live game CD's to work with my ATI 9700 pro.
Also, IBM owns 20% of SuSE, thought they should push it.
Anger problem in parent post.
Their official site, (www.knoppix.org boldly states: "In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX..."
So, I'm gonna stick to my own home-made rescue disks for the time being, tyvm.
I used to think Peter Shipley was cool. Then I aged past 16.
Script kiddies, enjoy.
I made a floppy based linux especially for this purpose: http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/escape/. However, if you have a network, it is probably easier to use Knoppix to copy the data over the network rather than burn it to a cd. Note that Knoppix does have cdrecord and mkisofs on it; if you can boot knoppix from one cd drive, and have another to access as a burner (say an external USB cd burner) then you can save your data that way. Knoppix is better than my floppy setup, unless you have no network, and only a cd burner and no other CD device to boot from. Knoppix also supports more filesystems and hardware than I can fit on a floppy or care to deal with.
Another good live boot cd is Timo's rescue cd:
http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net/
It's got a lot of drivers (as modules), ext2 (which should work on ext3) undelete utilities, and all the daemon and client utils you could want. It's great for non-booting laptops that need to have data dumped off of them so you can reload the OS (something that happens a lot).
One thing it doesn't do is autodetect everything like Knoppix does, and it doesn't have X, but it does fit on a minicd where Knoppix does not.
-ft
Knoppix is great, but it's a ten-tonne anvil doing the job of a nut-cracker in this situation.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
I'm a very happy Knoppix user, IMHO is the final swiss knife!
Here a small list of very powerful features:
- NTFS (safe read only) support + all FS support
- the linux fdisk
- qtparted for working with partitions (like Partition Magic, but GPL)
- partimage (like Norton Ghost, but GPL)
- the cool LinNeighborhood (for easy windows/samba usage)
- diagnose all hardware with the knoppix auto-detect kernel
- all the best network diagnosis tools (nmap, nessus, tcpdump, ethereal, etc)
- vim
- kde
- easy support of external usb2/firewire external drives
- 1174 packages on a single autoboot CD
(is present a DVD version too on ftp!!!!!)
A nice link -> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/
about me A - B
I got Knoppix to boot the PC I run at work, but my home PC does not boot Knoppix.
I get to the point it starts the XServer, then the screen gets all black and the CD unit stops making noise and the light blinks in a repetitive pattern. The keyboard does not work and I have to hard reset the PC.
I tried sending the noscsi and the noagp arguments.
Even the expert mode, with no changes.
Before hanging, the PCI video board seemed to be detected correctly as well as the monitor.
What do you mean 'shows how to' its obvious and knoppix recognises your drives settings automatically.
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
Over the past few weeks Knoppix has gotten me out of a couple tough spots.
First, I was setting up RedHat on my laptop. Unfortunately, RH9 came with no drivers for my ethernet or wifi. No problem, I'll just go online and... Uh oh, Catch-22, I can't download network drivers till I get online. Fortunately, Knoppix recognized the ethernet card and got me up and running, I downloaded to the hard drive, rebooted to RedHat, and set it up.
True, I could have also solved that using sneakernet / USB drive / whatever, but the next time Knoppix helped me it was more indispensable. I was adjusting my LILO settings and came up with a conf file that ran just fine in lilo, but caused a kernel panic every time I booted with it. No rescue disc either, being a floppyless computer. I booted Knoppix, fixed the lilo.conf, mounted my /boot partition, and made a working bootloader.
Anyway, Knoppix is good to have around. When something is messed up, it will get you up and running, see all your files, and see most of the hardware out there too. Plus of course the obvious Linux evangilism uses.
While I have used Knoppix, where I needed to recover data I've used SystemRescueCD, and as my main drive has just died (the second one this month!) I'll be using it again shortly. It's based on the Gentoo LiveCD, is less than half the size of Knoppix, and contains all the utilities you need for rescuing and repartitioning (Partimage, parted/QtParted, fdisk, sfdisk, dd_rescue, plus all the usual stuff). Granted, it's not as friendly as Knoppix for the uninitiated as it just dumps you at a prompt after auto-detecting everything, but in any case you really have to know what you're doing to recover a system in this way so I don't think that's an issue.
I've written a small article in the Gentoo Docs forum about recovering my system using the CD.
One thing that KNOPPIX is missing, probably for legal reasons though, is support for nforce video network cards. Lots of MBs these days are the sort with only 1 nforce NIC on it, and not having net when booting up my new box with KNOPPIX is a bit of a pain.
Rather than the "Knoppix" is great which everyone agrees with I was wondering if any Morphix users out there can contrast the two.
The reason most linux distributions stop booting is that something has fscked up the boot sector or a new kernel build has gone bad. Either way
you can easily rescue your system by booting off a kernel floppy , no special rescue disk required. Even if the boot failure is
because of corrupted init files you can always boot into single abuser mode so I fail to see the need for a bells & whistles rescue CD. If your whole drive is screwed then its reinstall time anyway, rescue CD or not.
I'm a happy morphix user. They've got distros with games (linux games incl on disc), for games (Wine for windoze games configured), and for general light/heavy GUI stuff. I've passed out a few Morphix LightGUI discs at work. They came in most handy when two servers inexplicably had /usr and /etc nuked by a script following bad symlinks. Bootup up, got on the net, mounted drives (SCSI even), and copied the files from another very similar machine with no fuss.
/mnt/hdb1/* /mnt/hda1" (wonder if "dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/hda1" would work too?). Otherwise, I'd have to hook both up to a windows machine with a third bootable drive in order to avoid "file in use" errors.
I've also used it to copy over a bad windows drive to a good one, mounting both drives and doing a good ol' "cp -vfr
Run knoppix testcd at the SYSLINUX bootprompt to verify the integrity of the cd. Hit F2 for short list of other options. E.g., knoppix dma will enable DMA, and knoppix fluxbox will use the fluxbox wm.