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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....
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)
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.
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.
"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."
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?