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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."
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....
I'm still kind of a Linux newbie. I knew that I would mess up with installing the kernel, but it gives me the experience to learn from my mistakes.
Without a floppy drive in them.
...and the HTMLised coralised link is: this.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and for Windows users learning linux. *ahem*
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)
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.
how safe is it to be able to access anything just by putting a disk in the drive
Well, on my machines (i.e. which I use, @home or @work) only booting from the main hdd is allowed, everythig else is disabled, bios pass'ed. If I want to boot from something else, I enable it. One would need many minutes long work to open the cases and reset the bioses especially if they don't know the specific mobo.
Not a very good protection by any means, but it stops giggling coworkers from being jerks on my machine.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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.
Toms Root Boot was always enough for me.
1 floppy.
TRB, Lepton and other floppy distributions I've tried (for real use, not just recovery situations) have all been exceptionally high quality. The guys who put them together really know what they're doing. Any idiot can stick half a gig of programs on a CD, it takes smarts to get them onto 1 o 2 floppies.
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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.
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
"Why bother with using bloated tools that only get in the way when you can do the exact same thing with a boot floppy."
GUI != bloat. Web browser != bloat, especially during system recovery.
Come to think of it, why am I even wasting time spelling out the obvious reasons why Knoppix is an awesome recovery tool?
"Derp de derp."
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.
It would go down. Economy of scale.
What BS. Ever heard of Microsoft? Ever hear of their prices going down due to economies of scale? If there was zero competition, would their price go down? I think not.
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.
Everything on my drive is 128 bit AES encrypted on the fly when I use it - you and your knoppix CD can take your best shot. It's not the fault of the Knoppix people that your data is insecure enough to be read by anyone with a boot disk.
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 * * * *"
And I think you've hit upon one of the most interesting things about Knoppix: it's useful to Windows sysadmins. I work on a multi-platform network, and I've used this distro many times on both Windows and Linux machines. The NTFS driver works great, and recently helped me restore a DLL that a user had "accidentally deleted." Of course it's also a Samba client, so you can drag and drop their files from the damaged machine to the file server for safe keeping.
It's all shown me how good a job Microsoft could do if they actually cared. Knoppix really is better than Microsoft's own recovery console, and makes me wonder why (a) Windows doesn't simply restore missing DLLs on its own when they turn up missing (copies are in the i386 folder, and sometimes other places, so what the heck?), and (b) why there isn't a bootable Windows CD for recovery (maybe because it would be the most pirated CD ever?).
These experiences left me unsurprised when Google released a desktop search tool that renders Longhorn's WinFS obsolete ... two years before the release of Longhorn. Is Bill asleep at the wheel?