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.

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: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.

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.

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/

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.