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 rules

[shaitand]

At the very least it never ceases to amaze the windows geeks.

Re:knoppix rules

[pizza_milkshake]

best. livecd. ever.

Why don't you

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you use Windows Emergency Repair disks, you GNU hippies? Or fine CD-ROM support that comes with Windows(r) Recovery Console?

Re:Why don't you

[stefanlasiewski]

Why don't you use Windows Emergency Repair disks, you GNU hippies?

Because I'm lazy. Why use 4 floppies, which only contain a small number of utilities, when I can just use a single CD-ROM with zillions of powerful utilities, network access, etc.

Also, with 4 floppies, I've always found that one of the four disks will be corrupted when I try to use it.

With Win98, I kept 2-3 emergency disks lying around just in case one disk was corrupt. The same strategy for Win2K would require 8 or 12 disks disks.

Re:Why don't you

[pulu]

You might think about This CD for windows.... I used Knoppix all the time, but the lack of good NTFS support in linux constantly gets me down. This guy is XP/2003 based, and does pretty much the same thing. You can virus scan too, which windows loves.

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!

Re:Knoppix is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux geek? Running Gentoo? Employed? Communicating with colleagues?

Ah, gimme a friggin break. There are so many lies in this brief paragraph I wouldn't know where to start.

Re:Knoppix is great

[Brandybuck]

They can see that you have no viruses just by walking past your desk? Wow! How bad of a virus problem do you have at your place!

Why no SuSE?

[BrookHarty]

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.

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.

Timo's Rescue CD is another good one

[Loualbano2]

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

The best tool :)

[hunte]

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/

Knoppix saved me twice

[Experiment 626]

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.

Knoppix vs. Morphix

[jbolden]

Rather than the "Knoppix" is great which everyone agrees with I was wondering if any Morphix users out there can contrast the two.