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."

Comments

Knoppix is great

[forsetti]

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!

Rescuing data from a broken machine

[RGRistroph]

Knoppix is very useful for getting your data out of a broken computer, prior to re-installing or replacing the harddrive outright.

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.