Slashdot Mirror
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."
What if the Linux that you can't boot already is Knoppix? Can you swap this recovery CD with your regular Knoppix CD during the boot process?
Just two days ago I just had to use Knoppix to recover my system after a failed attempt to upgrade the kernel. Very good to have as a recovery tool.
Knoppix, the hot new kid on the block
New? Wow, I'm glad I don't live in that neighborhood.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Care to explain?
Don't most distributions provide a boot disk to give you the kind of access you need?
Is that IBM has done this, right off their own website and helping the system admins, techies and anyone else interested in learning how to fix your defunct or otherwise broken system.
This one's been around for a while. It's a useful resource, but some of the more specialised distros are easier to use for rescue disks.
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php has a good list of them.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Well, apart from the "Duh- What else are you gonna use it for?" line, I suppose its nice to RE-distribute the info to those 3 or 4 around here that haven't heard of knoppix...And also nice that IBM is running the piece. That kinda lends some pointy-haired massive corporate legitimacy to the tool...
But maybe I'm mistaken...Okay, then--- Quick Poll- Who HAS NOT heard of and tried a Knoppix disk?
Sig currently under construction. Mind the gap....
OMG! We slashdotted IBM!
[would have been funnier if it were true]
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You can also use the gentoo live CD (you can even get an experimental one for reiser4) at www.gentoo.org.
k s/linux/library/l-knopx.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01-obg-Sys Recover
There are also lots of speecialised ones. generally, the only time a linux box wont boot though is just a lilo or grub problem...
By the way, the coralised link is: http://www-106.ibm.com.nyud.net:8090/developerwor
I think NTFS is probably read-only so you can't fix it directly. But in case you weren't smart enough to keep backups around, you can use Knoppix to backup your files over the network. I did the same thing for a friend who couldn't boot up her XP installation anymore after Norton Antivirus "cleaned" a bit too much (even safe mode didn't work). But I ended up copying the data to an external firewire disk 'cause the network (which Knoppix didn't have any problems to detect) was too slow.
Go Linux/Knoppix!
Ricardo.
It is amazing to me that you can basically have the power of a full operating system all boot on a live cd.
I used a Suse live cd a while ago to fix grub on my desktop, so I am a beleiver in live cds. I have heard a lot about knoppix, so I think that it is about time I downloaded an iso, especially now that there are some good acticles on it.
It's always good to be prepared just in case you do something stupid, and in my case, there are an abundance of those situations.
Without a floppy drive in them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and for Windows users learning linux. *ahem*
You choose to use a mac then that's what you get. Might pay to buy more sensibly next time.
RST
Tbe Knoppix Distro has been helpful at this point - and I'm glad that I kept it around, because I needed to get these people's email transferred without much hassle
db
Cig:
ôô
(Mini Usual Stuff)
It's been a long time since I've needed anything else. I used to carry a Trinux CD, but now it's Knoppix.
I use the compact flash card because it fits in both my camera and my PDA.
sigs, as if you care.
No, I'm not a weenie who needs things spoon fed to them, I've been using Linux since long before it was cool or chic, starting with Slack back in '96, then RedHat, then Mandrake. After Win2k came out I moved back to using Windows for most of my day-to-day desktop needs (now mostly Win XP), but recently I've installed MEPIS on my laptop and I find it quite enjoyable to use. The things that stand out to me are 1) fabulous hardware compatibility, including out of the box support for almost every component of my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop, with NVidia GeForce4 Go graphics and so on (I did have to make a quick manual edit to XF86Config-4 to get widescreen support, and my Microsoft MN-720 802.11b card took about half an hour of screwing around to get running, but ndiswrapper was already there, I just had to find the right driver version and run it.
Okay, that's all the ranting I can do for now. Did I mention that MEPIS makes a great recovery CD? That's how I first discovered it. Give it a try, funny name aside.
Partition image. Knoppix + partimage has saved me so many times after a failed dist-upgrade, that I keep a copy of Knoppix on top of every machine I own.
> Knoppix might be useful for rescuing a system, but as an
> overal distro, it suffers from the problem that you can't install
> it to your hard driv
Yeah, cos using the Knoppix "Install to Hard Drive" menu option and waiting is difficult.
Never done it myself, but I've heard that the knopix CDs include a debian installer. Also, you can use an external hard drive or flash drive to hold your home directory and just install stuff there.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
Except that Knoppix will happily install to your hard drive. It may not be pretty-shiney(tm) like some installers, but I don't find these to be "complex workarounds":
h tm l. htm l
http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/debian-knoppix.
http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install
Is this news?
The article was written a year ago, and even then it was not news (I have used Knoppix for this purpose longer than that)
"You can't install it to your hard drive."
Yes, you can: knx-hdinstall.
sigs, as if you care.
I've heard of knoppix a long time ago. I've burned a CD of knoppix. But I've never actually used it.
:P So sue me.
I think knoppix is a cool idea and I know they've put in a lot of hard work to put as many fucntional tools as possible on to one bootable cd, but I've just never gotten the oppurtunity to boot into it.
Joseph?
captive-ntfs 1.14 works just fine for me w/Knoppix 3.4 (though 1.15 w/Knoppix 3.6 failed to mount my NTFS partitions, that is another story altogether) ... so, you can actually read/write to NTFS from Knoppix if you manually configure captive and mount the NTFS partition(s) yourself.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Check again, the SimplyMEPIS-2004.03.iso is nowhere near a year old.
Bah! I've had my floppy disconnected for over 2 years and I have no clue if I still have any floppy disks around. Doesn't stop me from recovering a linux box. Once the boot cd starts its kernel, you can alt-fx to another shell and do whatever you want (remembering that you haven't actually booted your linux system yet and must mount everything and take care of initializations manually). You typically have to put a few entries in the boot program though (or have them detected with the newer ones).
I don't say K/Gnoppix is no good, because it's just great, imho the best live linux version for jumpstarting linux illiterates (other people check this. And I don't argue you can do lots of things with it. But for accessing and managing filesystems in general... well, access my xfs partitions with a knoppix please. or better not, keep away :)
If one wants to have rescue stuff ready, ones prepares good rescue stuff. E.g. an usb drive with a mini distro with >2 kernel versions helluvalot compiled modules, all possible filesystem support, disk fscking tools (for all supported filesystems) and you don't relly need much more.
A general purpose 2.4.x-based live distro for the masses jsut doesn't always qualify for such uses.
You know the drill, use the right tool for the job.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Just what I needed... someone drawing attention to the fact that they can access all my porn, I mean sensitive files, on my computer with just a knoppix disk but in all seriousness, how safe is it to be able to access anything just by putting a disk in the drive?
A friend brought me his machine to upgrade.
/home (hdb)....
/home from hda to hdb then reformat hda and partition it up in a useful way.
/home data from hda to hdb.
/home is on hdb1.
/home on the new 120g drive and asked me if I wanted to change the permissions and ownership over. I said yes.
/home directory instead of the 10gigs he had before.
A Frys cheapo Linux special, originally it came with a 30g, 128m ram and Thiz Linux. I Thized the disc straight into the trash and installed Suse 9.0 on it for him when he first got it.
Well, as time went on he realized that his system needed upgrading. So I sent him to the store and he brought back another 128m ram, a 120g drive and Suse 9.1 Pro.
The plan was to have the old doggy 30g as his boot/OS/work drive (hda) and his new 120g as
Well, booting up 9.1 does not come up and say
"Hey, I see you have data on your drive already and a new blank drive. Would you like to move it around in anyway before we procede?"
No, Suse just suggests that you wipe everything out and start over. Even if you tell it you want to do an upgrade, it has NO PROVISION what-so-ever to allow you to format the new drive then move your old
Ok, so in light of this, I took Damn Small Linux 0.8.2
and booted up. Opened a root terminal, fdisked hdb, formated it for ext3 then moved all of his old
It copied EVERYTHING. Hidden files, configurations, email, cookies, bookmarks, music, photos, the whole works.
When it was done I booted into Suse 9.1 pro, did a NEW INSTALLATION and wiped hda clean, installed the OS on it and told it that
I created the same user and password as the old system so Suse looked at the
The install proceded normally to completion.
When it was finished and I rebooted the system, it was identical to the way it was brought to me except that he now has a 120g
Damn Small Linux is the very best tool a tech can carry with him. I keep a copies on biz cards in all of my tool boxes and in each of my vehicles.
I don't leave home without it.
I also carry standard Knoppix in case I run into a case where I need k3b on the ailing machine.
I have several other versions of Knoppix I keep handy for various network jobs, like knoppix-std
and a few other network related Knoppix knock offs..
I can rescue my system from my Mandrake CD. At the menu type in "rescue" and you get access to everything you need.
I had to do this once when I had some directory corruption.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Heh, funny this story should come up now, I used Knoppix to recover customer web sites from a couple of disks from a compramised machine just the other day. Saved my life (coz if Knoppix wasn't there then I'd have to use a boot disk with vi on it, and I'd rather die, than use vi).
If you can't loop-mount it, dd it back to an other disk, then use your favourite Windows NTFS tool, if there is any.
For Windows XP I had used, more than once, Bart's PE.
Give it a chance, it's kind of knoppix for windows (it supports r/w to NTFS)
As a computer networking student I'm absolutely AMAZED this hasn't gotten more attention then it has.
Under your MS stuff (I know, I know, but in industry it really is a necessary evil) you should definitely have a Windows Boot CD. And I don't mean a DOS floppy! Its basically a live, say Windows XP disk with preinstalled software (virus scan, adware removers, registry editors, complete networking setup). It really has all the tools you commonly use when fixing the obligatory windows box and probably a few you've never even known you'd need.
I highly recommend you build one, and if the directions sound a little complicated, just take your time and reread them, there's about 3 step and none of the are actually complicated.
The worst thing you can do is boot a infected PC from an infected hard drive, not to mention the trouble accessing NTFS with FULL read-write.
Quack, quack.
I'm dying to figure this part out...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Of course you could have done this with SuSE as well, but you should not have tried two things (upgrade and drive reassignment) in one go. /home to it, or first add the new drive and move /home, then re-install from scratch on the old drive.
You could have upgraded from 9.0 to 9.1 first and then add the new drive and move
Actually, the gripe is a legitimate one, although very poorly presented. I'm a regular on the Knoppin forums at www.knoppix.net and I constantly see people posting problems with things (mostly simple networking) that worked fine under Knoppix when running from the CD but stopped working as soon as Knoppix was installed to hard disk. Most of the time this seems to be simple permission issues or something that for some reason I don't understand needs to be added to a configuration file. But it's been going on for years and the install scripts never seem to get around to addressing it and making the premissioins right. See for yourself by scanning this forum.
I just write it off to the arogance that almost all Linux geeks seem to have for newcomers who don't know the cryptic commands to change permissions or all the magic places startup configuration stuff is stored. The geeks who master Knoppix must come across the same problems, but just know where to go to twiddle the right bits to make everything right. That they don't "bother" to go back and make the HD install scripts do this seems strange.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Last I heard write was still experiencing random failures, not that it matters for data recovery.
But I'd recommend using this to work on/repair Windows computers. You get read/write (its really just Windows, so..) and a lot of crap can be repaired with a virus/adware scan (or two). If your comfortable enough with Windows there really isn't much you can't recover from once you can read the disk (sort of a complete hardware failure).
As a side note, it also reads ext2 and 3. Handy for working on your friends dual-boot systems too.
Personally, I carry on of these and either Knoppix or an older Gentoo live disk.
Quack, quack.
The article is dated October 23, 2003. Nearly a year old!
/. readers know about Knoppix already.
There must be newer versions of almost everything mentioned in the article, and probably better ways of doing most of the tasks...
And most
Well, the whole point of the exercise was to install 9.1 on the 30g and use the entire 30g for the OS. The way I did it allowed me to wipe the old drive totally out and start over with it fresh and 100% dedicated to the OS and nothing else.
/home.. I saw no other way to accomplish this task in as few steps as this method took.
hda is strictly for the OS and hdb is strictly for
The other thing that was nice about using DSL, I just had to mount the partitions, they were already full R/W without playing the permission games you normally have to play with standard Knoppix 3.6
DSL was really a whole lot easier, oh so easy but oh that scary, scary CLI.....
Knoppix is a great livecd, but a horrible installer. It's less trouble to just install straight Debian.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
There are scripts right in Knoppix that let you do a HD install; but that doesn't mean everything is going to work as you would expect. I've been a regular at www.knoppix.net for a couple of years, and I'm always seeing problems that just shouldn't happen with HD installs. Simple things like permissions being set wrong on the install and networking that worked from to CD no longer working after the HD install. In fact, if you look at the specialized forums, you will see that there are nearly twice as many posts in the HD install forumthan even the hardware forum , and nearly three times as many posts as in the networking forum (yet many of the posts in the networking forun are about network access stopping after a HD install). So you can install to HD, just don't expect it to work even as well as it did from CD after you do!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Check out official forums for confirmation. ISO available here, why not use the Coral Cache and save a /.ing? It has nifty new firewalling in addition to all the usual updates. This version was released from the German PC-Welt magazine and is in German only, but using lang=whatever at boot time will cure that. It will obviously differ from the 'official' 3.7 CD which should come out soon, but not by much - so worth a CD-RW for the curious I suppose. md5sums are spewed around the net, no point me quoting one as I am not to be trusted (TM). testcd is a useful check.
I think you could have added the new disk to the old running system, fdisk and format it using yast or commandline tools, move your home there, and then re-install the system on the 30GB disk. / /home, format it) /dev/sdb1 is now mounted as /home) /home.orig/* /home /home.orig
/home is /dev/sdb1.
I would have done:
- login as root
- cd
- mv home home.orig
- mkdir home
- yast
(add the disk, say it will be
- df
(make sure the
- mv
- rmdir
home is now on the new disk.
reboot system from CD, install 9.1 on 30GB and during partition selection tell it that
that should do it.
Luckily I haven't had to use Knoppix to recover any crashed systems...
However I did use it to tweak the device settings on my install of FreeBSD. Knoppix has always detected anything I threw at it, while FreeBSD isn't quite up to the same level (but getting better). So, I gave Knoppix a whirl and got enough driver info for the noname videocard that shipped in the used computer I was setting up as a server.
Rock on Knoppix!
Where is ntfsclone in the latest KNOPPIX? I tried version 3.4 I think it was - couldn't find it anywhere, so had to revert to 3.3. There was an ntfsprogs package but it didn't seem to include all the tools. That's all I use KNOPPIX for - making an image of my Win2K partition.
Tom's Root Boot" is the only Linux boot CD needed to fix a Linux system. Although I use Knoppix occasionally to test hardware.
You can mount the partition, it will be read only. Start up Samba and browse your network with LinNeiborhood. Copy your files from the non-booting system to a network share on another machine. No need to lose anything.
new versions use knx2hd
Knoppix-std has full ntfs support via captive ntfs. Only requirement is that you have a copy of ntfs.sys by hand.
Dvorak on Doomtech
My swiss army knife beats your damn small linux any day of the week :-)
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I had a fault on my home system, so I tried to knoppix my wife around. I did not recover from the attempt no matter what utilities I tried. I tried to reiser, I tried to fsck her. I even tried mem86 check her and remind her of all the good times we had. In the end, she rebooted me no matter how many times I tried to replug her.
Knoppix not good for everything.
Yep, this is bad. Baaaddd joke if you can call it that.
Oh, by the way, this is nothing but flaimbait.
Burn karma, burn.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
http://rescuecd.pld-linux.org/
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
No, Suse just suggests that you wipe everything out and start over. Even if you tell it you want to do an upgrade, it has NO PROVISION what-so-ever to allow you to format the new drive then move your old /home from hda to hdb then reformat hda and partition it up in a useful way.
:-)
Handy feature about the SuSE installation stuff - while it comes up with a nice, graphical interface, virtual console Alt-F(something) has a full bash prompt with lots of useful utilities.
It's possible to bring up network connectivity at a very early stage (done automatically if you're doing an FTP install) so if you need to get old data off a machine, an NFS mount is also a possibility. As is using w3m to read Slashdot while the installation progresses.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
And on sleuthkit and you are setup to recover (this does mean patching the disk but it is worth it).
Knoppix does not have read write support. INSERT can read and write NTFS partion when mix with sleuthkit can read into a damaged NTFS partion.
Question was the partition was stuffed or was windows to badly damaged to reinstall.
Note g4u image of the partion is the best option before making any changes to the disk. Even g4u back on to a new drive before working on it.
http://home.earthlink.net/~leon.gandalf/KNOPPIX_V3 .6-2004-08-16-EN-Live-CD.torrent/ :)
If you have not tried Knopix Live CD, here is a BitTorrent link.
If anyone has a Bittorrent to 3.7 POST IT...
First of all, there are a couple of basic steps people can take to ensure their systems are rescuable and secure regardless of any patches they have applied.
Following above steps is usually enough to prevent rescue situations because the root filesystem is vital, so protecting it is the first line of defense, but if the worse comes to worst and you ever get into trouble, you must learn with the problem. If the kernel loads and init doesn't, it may be a libc problem. Try booting with init=/bin/sh, remount your filesystems read-write, examine the problem, umount them (or remount them read-write, when unmount is not possible), sync, reboot and watch the changes. If the kernel does not load, you may need a
Little tip, Spinrite will save you. Just recovered the contents of an NTFS drive after the sectors started dying. Took 55 hours to run the program but i got back all my data.
I've seen this a few times. It seems as though the boot process uses a different method of accessing the disk, but when Windows loads the real IDE/SCSI driver, the machine freezes.
This actually means that your entire drive is not dead, and recovery through Knoppix indeed could be a possibility. Maybe read-only, but then again, you don't wanna go changing those tax records!
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
captive-ntfs needs a captive user and group to work properly. Manually adding them allows it to work correctly again on 3.6. I even made a personal remaster of Knoppix with fix and the XP drivers captive-install-acquire already done. That last is handy because I have had NICS that XP didn't recognize and it gets the driver install files on the disk.
Insert linux is a knoppix based recovery linux that has read/write access to ntfs partitions. Very handy and has some nice recovery tools. It still needs a few more things but they are working on it from what I read.
Wow - Solaris has been doing this for years - SunOS even used to do it off tape.
Ever hear of "boot [cdrom|net|root-mirror] -s"? Come up in single user off alternate media, mount your root disk and proceed to fix as necessary.
Even DOS was able to do this - it was called a boot floppy.
Just because something puts a new wrapper on the process and because its based of Linux doesnt make it incredible.
Where can I get a copy of that remaster? That's one of the most useful things about Knoppix, after all.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
however if you read the FAQ on the new version of knoppix, they explicitly stateWhich is all well and good; if you speak/read German. Otherwise you get a bunch of errors in German that you can't decipher.
Instead, I installed slackware.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
HAHAHAHA.. frelled..
hey.. that's on tomorrow!! woo hoo!!
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Knoppix can do that and a whole lot more.
Knoppix Hacks
Virus scanning, emergency router, write to NTFS, even fire up a mythtv box.
Not only is this old, but it was old news back when I first started using computers with hard disks... the only difference is the mechanism you use to get a kernel booted from another device.
linux guy uses linux tools to work on linux...
how about an article on using knoppix CD to recover winDohs when it won't boot and files when winDohs is
xtra phucked.
yes, NTFS mounts OK with CD booted knoppix
I'm shocked and horrified.
In addition to these, a CD with Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Gaim, and Audacity installers can be quite useful. And Emacs can be a lot nicer than Notepad for editing Windows config files, so I'd bring that too.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Knoppix booted fine, found the drive, read the NTFS without problems (read only, but I think you can mount it with write access) and within the first two clicks we started samba and sshd so that we could save the data. I was quite glad about that ...
On the other hand ... we didn't fix the partition afterwards, we had to throw the disk away.
It was nice to be able to use the boot CD to recover.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Exactly. Everytime Knoppix is mentioned as a Live CD 10 people come out and remind everyone there is a script that will install it to the hard drive. They say you'll have a great debian system.
Well, I've tried that a few times and my luck wasn't so great. It would install and I could boot, but apt wasn't working nicely at all. I think I ended up killing apt when I tried to do a simple update. Other programs didn't work as nicely as from the Live CD.
So yeah, Knoppix is great from a Live CD, but it has too many problems for every day use as a hard drive based distro. I think there are lots of other better choices for that.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/
Pete Forsyth
I lived on it for a month while evaluating which distro I was going to go with.
I chose Gentoo, but I always have the latest Knoppix boot-cd with me because I frequently screw up my system.
That's what has amazed me since abandoning Windows last year; with Linux, you always seem to be able to go in and fix whatever is broken.
In the Windows world, often, there is NO other alternative but backing up the data and reformatting.
Knoppix embodies just how powerful open source is; it's a modular distro, able to boot from a CD with no need of a hard-disk.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Just one minor modification to this. You should probably use tar or cpio instead of mv. For example:
/home.orig
/home; tar xf - )
/home.
cd
tar cf - . | ( cd
The reason? The mv command will not keep any hard links when mv'd across filesystems; tar will. Unless of course, you are absolutely 100% sure you have no hard linked files in
And whatever you do, *don't* use cp; otherwise both your hard and sym-links will go bye-bye too.
F U NE X N M? Son: "Dad... How do you spell 'hourly'?" Dad: "0 * * * *"
I have been using a scaled down version of a Linux recovery CD at work. I use it at least once a week to backup data from a non booting XP/W2K computer. Even if the person only needs Favorites and My/ Documents, it provides a method for recovery that my Microsoft stacked IT department did not have before.
;)). I picked this one because it was the easiest and quickest to use for what I need, at around 25MB is was relatively small also.
It is not as robust as Knoppix but simple, quick and to the point.
Boot with CD, start the network through an included script, manually mount the Win partition, manually mount the network share, run MC and copy off what you need. I know that does not sound exciting and sexy but if you know the commands and what you need to mount and where, it is a faster process then booting up Knoppix and using the GUI.
I believe the iso I am using is from here. I am not completely sure as I've been using the same thing for over a year now and at the time, I downloaded several different recovery iso's to test them out (kind of makes my entire post useless if I can not reference what ISO I actually use
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
On more than on occasion, now, I've successfully resurrected "dead" Windows machines by using Knoppix as a (very powerful) diagnostic tool. It not only has allowed me to recover files from a WIN-XP drive that a fresh install of XP wouldn't touch, it also is very helpful at determining if a system failure is hardware or software related.
:)
I give Knoppix an enthusuastic two thumbs-up as an indispensible tool in my PC "repairman's kit".
It really adds to the "geek factor" when you can recover someone's valuable data from a machine that someone else said was "beyond hope".
Willie...
"That's what has amazed me since abandoning Windows last year; with Linux, you always seem to be able to go in and fix whatever is broken."
True, howver you need to know WHAT to do in order to fix the system. That's not on the disk.
I was upgrading a laptop from Fedora Core 1 to Core 2 and encountered a problem with Fedora's support for the ATi Rage Mobility.
I remembered that with the install of Core 1 that text installation was needed as graphical installation would fail. Fortunately though, video would work after installation. Unfortunately, Core 2 wasn't so kind.
I grabbed my trusty Knoppix disc and copied the working video driver over and restarted X. Problem solved and with framebuffer support even.
It was much quicker than trying to find working drivers on-line, downloading, compiling, and then installing them. It may not have been the "correct" method, but it worked and is still working.
Hey, IBM, that was only a demonstration of our power.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The most certain way to make it happen in my experience is the following:
1. Use regedit (Start, Run, regedit) to get in the registry and delete any "Winsock" and "Winsock2" keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\system\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\
2. Reboot
3. Open network control panel
4. Click install
5. Select "protocol", click OK
6. Select "have disk"
7. Type in c:\windows\inf in the path, click OK
8. Select TCP/IP, click OK
9. Reboot
Then you're back online. Again, it could be easier but really it's not that hard.
FWIW I don't think the first reboot is supposed to be necessary according to M$, but I have had mixed luck without it, and seeing as certain common spyware (such as new.net) causes this corruption to happen, I have had to run through this procedure a lot of times. It works well.
Wow... We slashdotted IBM! But to the point: I wonder what is your experience. What is better for system recovery? Standard Knoppix which is a general purpose desktop system meant to be an impressive demonstration tool but lacking many security programs, or some specialised versions like Knoppix STD or Local Area Security which have more tools but are kind of "script kiddie friendly" and look very unprofessional with their Martix themes, leet-speak, "proving no localhost is safe" slogans etc. making them look more like intrusion than recovery tools? Or maybe Morphix is the answer thanks to its ease of customisation and apt-getting new packages on the fly? Do you have any Real World(TM) experience?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I've had a knoppix cd in my arsinal for about 2-3 years now. With it and an external CD-RW (now a DVD+/-RW) I've been saving data off corrputed installs of both linux and windows systems. I havn't tried the latest knoppix for a while though since I custom built a CD that included the ability to mount read/write NTFS filesystems (using window's own NTFS drivers). Since then, I havn't seen the need of upgrading the knoppix version since it does everything I need it to do and more.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
You leave tax records on your hard drive? Ballsy.
Yeah, in a perfect world nobody gains access to your box and jacks your files. But here in Real Life(tm), crap happens. Why not limit your exposure in case it does? CD burners and blanks are cheap.
My school has a few Linux labs (they use Debian). EVERY computer has a CD-RW drive, and EVERY system has it disabled for regular users. So, I bring Knoppix so I can use the CD-RW (this is not strictly playing by the school rules, though). Also, sometimes when nobody is looking I grab the now unshadowed password file and crack the root password :)
you should've used ERD commander to try and fix an XP install imo, there's a free emergency download edition
o ve ry/erdcommander2002.asp?pid=erd
http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrec
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
That depends on what version you use and what kernel you install and what hardware you have. Some laptops, such as my Thinkpad T600, have notoriously buggy BIOS. Both ACPI and APM in newer kernels work well using Sarge. The same packages, of course, are available for Mepis and Mepis is easier with new hardware. The upshot is that you can install the last stable release of Mepis, knock out everything but Sarge from /etc/apt/sources.list, and get a nifty version of Sarge that has Spam Assassin for Kmail, MANY funky hardware drivers and MANY working commercial goodies like flash and real player configured and working. Mepis, especially the release candidates, does a very good job configuring newer hardware and can be used to test and repair X configurations.
The only downside to Mepis is that it instals freaking EVERYTHING. I don't need Apache and MySQL on my laptop, so I'd have to spend some time removing those and other packages. Also, I hate flash and prefer that my browser ignore it 99% of the time. That too takes some time. For an older laptop, Sarge works better for me. Mostly, hardware support is a kernel function and newer kernels do it better. The kernels available in Sarge are generally good enough and the install works.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How To Do A Virus Scan With Knoppix
Starting with 3.4, it comes with a f-prot installer. It scans and cleans viruses, except not on NTFS, it only tells you if your NTFS partition is infected, which it probably is. Because Linux NTFS support is still unreliable. But the advantage is you scan from a known clean disk and the latest virus definitions. And it's free.
A few weeks ago one of our people brought in a laptop that XP wouldn't boot anymore. ERD Commander couldn't find Windows. However, I popped in Knoppix and backed up all of her files onto the network. Read-only NTFS and network access was all we needed....
So not only is this a dup of an earlier story from last year, but this posting is the EXACT SAME TEXT as the earlier story. Is Slashdot now rerunning stories that reach or approach their 1-year anniversary???
You have to make it yourself. That remaster has files that are copyright MS on it. You'll need a fairly beefy machine to do it in less than geological time. A machine that is at least 1GHz and 512MB(+ 1GB swap) of memory gets tolerable. I use a 2.4Ghz PIV with a GB of RAM. That will spit an iso out in about 7 minutes. You will also need at least 3GB of disk space to hold the uncompressed distro and the iso you will make from it. Follow the instructions here.
Knoppix IS Debian so you'll need some Debian knowledge to update the package database and to add and remove files. You will be doing most of the work in a chroot so you DON'T need a Debian machine to make a remaster. You can even boot from a KNOPPIX cd and create it that way.
Once you've created your Knoppix development environment according to the instructions, you do these things to enable captive.
1. Create a captive user.
2. Create a captive group.
3. captive-install-acquire
Cheers!
LILO knows nothing about filesystems (never used grub, so I can't talk about it, but I suspect the same thing happens with it)
GRUB understands filesystems. ext2, ext3 and I think FAT are all available, and there are different "stage1.5"s for other filesystems.
With GRUB you can load an arbitrary kernel with arbitrary initrd with arbitrary parameters at boot time. Or arbitrarily chainload another OS like DOS or Win*.
Just last night I tried using KNOPPIX to setup grub on my boot hd (root (hd1,0) then setup (hd0)), but it didn't work. For some reason I have to use a GRUB boot floppy for that to work. Don't know why it doesn't work from KNOPPIX's GRUB command line (after booting; KNOPPIX uses SYSLINUX to start).
Off the cd clustering:
http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/
Hmm, bofh? Bastard operator from hell.
I suffered a major Windows crash a couple months ago on my 3 year old IBM T21 laptop (which has been my only computer in college) and was able to recover all my Windows data through Linux. I was dual booting the system with Fedora Core 2, and after the crash Windows would not go further than the loading screen (froze on the notorious agp440.sys). I tried recovering with both the XP install CD as well as NTFS diskettes, but neither could see the XP partition (which was the first on the disk). I saved everything by booting to Linux, mounting the NTFS using the read only module, and scp-ing all my data to a FAT32 partition on another Linux machine. From there I said screw Windows and wiped the disk and only use Linux on that laptop (which I'm typing on now).
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
My wife's XP machine crashed while trying to upgrade to Service Pack 2. We spent at least an hour of trying to get it to boot and dealing with tech support and they told us "Sorry, but you have lost everything. You will need to use the system recovery CD to get it working again."
That was when I decided to download the newest version of knoppix and copy all the data to an external drive which we had just purchased. In half an hour we had everything we needed and are now restoring her computer.
Maybe this will be enough to get her to consider the switch.
The short: Knoppix Rocks!
The long: I am a system administrator for a very small network. Back in May of this year, our Win2K file server crashed hard. After reinstalling the OS, I found that Windows refused to import a NTFS disk containing the users files. We had everything backed up on tape, but found the cranky tape drive wasn't working properly. No dice there. Around 8 PM I decided to give Knoppix a try. I was introduced to Knoppix while in school, but I am by no means a Linux Guru. To my surprise it booted the first time and successfully mounted the troubled drive. After a bit of searching, I found the instructions on the Net detailing system recovery using Knoppix. Using the methods detailed, I recovered 40 Gigs off of the drive. Talk about saving my hide! Now, Knoppix is a part of my recovery toolkit.
If you've never tried Knoppix, now is the time!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am a macintosh admin that ended up doing tons of windows desktops too. I was surprised by the lack of rescue tools for our windows systems at work. On a mac it is easy, boot from firewire drive, or boot from cd, or boot as a target of another machine. Then you can rescue data and move it easily. I asked the other admins about booting from a cd and moving stuff over the network, etc and nobody had a cd for this. I decided to try using my knoppix cd to get data from a non booting dell XP laptop. Basically I figured it out in less than 15 minutes. I booted from knoppix, mounted the local hard drive, started samba service (dont remember the gui name) and shared it. Then I went to my pc, typed in the ip address, username knoppix and a password set by me. Full access to the unbootable machine's HD over the network. Thanks slashdot and knoppix !
music lover since 1969
mod parent up re: BartPE
music lover since 1969
I botched the setup for ivtv and lirc in /etc/modules.conf on my wife's computer, so that it panicked during boot. Fired up Knoppix, pulled the bogus lines from /etc/modules.conf, and all was well again. Whew.
a few months ago while trying to re-partition my 200gig drive, partition magic came up with some random error and then refused to even read the partition table, simply stating the entire drive had become one large partition of unknown type, as well as windows would not read anything on the hard drive.
several partitioning repair software choices later, i decided to see what my knoppix boot cd would give me for options, and low and behold the partition options actually gave me a list of all the seperate partitions on that drive, alowing me to see what was causing the problem (something like another smaller partition that was created that made the whole drive messed up), simply using knoppix to delete it and reboot, saved me a few gigs of data.
Since then Knoppix has replaced ERD for when i need to recover a pc, even on windows boxes.
When we have need to repair or reinstall a Windows box and don't yet have the network card working, we found it to be much easier to boot from Knoppix, download the drivers for the network card, store them on the windows partition, and reboot to Windows to install them. (Yes, I know that this is kind of like taking blood thinner to make the arsenic work faster, but...)
Okay, why is my post modded funny.
Why has anyone assumed that I have read the article?
And back to my original question, where can I find useful information on driving winmodems from live linux CDs?
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
This is a fine article, but I am not sure why it was posted here, since apparently everyone at slashdot already uses Knoppix.
On a locked-down box, you will not get any 'sensitive' data, even with physical access.
Some distros (Suse is one I'm sure of) require the root password even in runlevel 1, out of the box.
I lost the root password to a suse box and had to knoppix boot to fix. (And then tripwire notified me of this quicksmart when things were going again.)
Better to stay silent, and let people think you're an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt
This is because Windows (willfully) stomps on the boot loader for any non-MS OS during installation. Once you understand this, it's more annoying than anything else.
It's not that hard to fix... boot into knoppix (or the rescue mode of your install CDs), and mount the Linux partition. /dev/hda1 with the name of your Linux partition... cat /etc/fstab for a list of what's where.}
Red Hat(replace
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
My HD gave up the ghost while preparing my MBA oral defense. After pulling the drive, I booted to Knoppix and ordered a new one on line. Still makes me giggle when I think about it.
after installing some video driver on my XP box, the dang thing refused to boot up. after it failed several diagnostics tests, I knew something was seriously wrong. I had already resigned myself to getting a new, fatter hard drive, but I wanted to get several important folders with photos, documents and addresses off of the dang thing before I trashed it, or reformatted. i remembered that I had burned a copy of Knoppix-STD a few months earlier, and after booting up with it on the damaged box things went really smoothly from there. I managed to find a program that autodetected my DVD burner and without any configuration allowed me to burn two DVDs worth of data from my hard drive without any problems.
I can't remember the exact name of the program on the STD disc (I think it was something like KD3) but it saved my life.
...because you never know who you're dealing with.
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
NTFS is read-only in 2.4 kernels. In the latest knoppix CD, I believe that there is an option to use the 2.6 kernel to write to NTFS.
boot knoppix up, under the penguin menu, select Network/Internet-> /dev/modem setup, then there are checkboxes, one of which is for "unsupported winmodem".
YMMV.
used to be true for sure. at 3.6, if you want to run "testing/sarge", it's pretty easy now. I installed one a few weeks ago, and apt-get against the debian repositories "just works."
I even tried swapping repositories back and forth and it never got confused.
The one thing that is messy is the kernel. The knoppix kernel documentation is just wrong. It says it is a straight debian kernel, but there are many fiddly bits added (ie. ipw2100 wlan, wavelan, & winmodem drivers, etc...) but the rest is pretty straight forward.
You cant write to NTFS but you can read and backup to the net. Knoptix is one of the many tools we use at my schools help desk to recover files off of a corrupted install either windows or Linux installs. I have found it myself usefully when bash got corrupted on my Debian system. It has made it a ease to move files over to an external source when having to back up after a system crash. I have saved a good amount of peoples data through this method.
Linux is like a teepee. It has no windows, no gates, and there's an Apache inside.
I have. Version 3.4 did not introduce any new trouble in the hd install. apt worked.
chl
In a day, I was basically able to create a new Knoppix CD that can: