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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."
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."
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.
For those not in the know, "Knoppix is a GNU/Linux distribution that boots and runs completely from CD." (Source: www.knoppix.net).
:-) The parent comment is in fact funny (and quite so!), rather than insightful as it's currently moderated. ;-)
So it is kind of hard for a Knoppix installation to become corrupt; worst case scenario is you just burn new copy of the Knoppix CD.
"You can't install it to your hard drive."
Yes, you can: knx-hdinstall.
sigs, as if you care.
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
Google for some more articles by the same author. There are gems there.
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
I just did this tonight, but with an age old debian iso. XP overwrote my MBR, but all it took was a chroot so I could run lilo.
It was the strangest thing. By all outward experiences XP was behaving properly but it wouldn't dhcp, or ping. Took a complete reinstall to fix. I wish there was a Winoppix to help me fix that, there just aren't the troubleshooting options there should be on windows. It could be my ignorance, but the cable guy was stumped too.
Umm... Knoppix can be installed on to the hard disk and many people actually do so because then they get a Debian-like OS on their hard-disk.
w To
Knoppix itself ships with a hard-disk install script. See this page for more info - http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/HdInstallHo
Regards,
The Shaitan
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..
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.
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!
I have four Knoppix hard drive installs around the house. Love it and have set it up for a half dozen former Windows uers.
But although I do love Knoppix, DSL has come a long way with its on-line install program that lets you basically customize your distro from almost scratch. Why Knoppix still refuses to pack the Nano editor still escapes me. Emacs is way too overweight for little setup script editing on the command line.
Just this weekend I replaced a dying notebook system that was dual booting SUSE and Win2K with DSL and all the problems went away.
The downside with DSL is no info or man pages. You can get the man pages once you're on-line, but no info pages? That's kinda fucked up. How can you tell someone to RTFM when they stripped it out?
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!
They wouldn't even have to open the case if they know some BIOS override passwords.
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)
Clickable: http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/HdInstallHow To
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
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.
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.
There is a sort-of Winnopix available. It's called BartPE. It's a CD bootable version of WinXP that lets you add almost any software package. YOu can use it for data recovery, forensics or as a temp OS. YOu can find it here.
And it fits on a floppy so you can boot it on your CD reader-less computers too.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
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.
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.
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???
Last I heard write was still experiencing random failures [...]
That was 4-5 years ago. Then Anton Altaparmakov disabled the unreliable write support and started to write a new driver from scratch. Today that one is included in Linux 2.6 kernels and it's reliable. Altough the write support is still limited but for example NTFS resizing is widely used and very reliable for over two years.
There are also two additional binary-only, full-featured, read-write NTFS drivers. One of them is Captive NTFS, using Windows' own NTFS driver the Wine way, and the other one is Paragon's NTFS driver.
Knoppix has four of the NTFS drivers:
1) old, broken NTFS in 2.4 kernels
2) new, safe NTFS in 2.6 kernels
3) Captive NTFS
4) userspace utilities: shared code with 2) but no kernel driver needed
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!
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
> why there isn't a bootable Windows CD for recovery (maybe because it would be the most pirated CD ever?).
:-), BartPE awaits you:
Your wish is granted
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
I've used this at work several times, and would NEVER consider the """Windows Recovery Console""" (ROTFLMAO) as a valid substitution for BartPE ever again.