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True Stories of Knoppix Rescues
Omniscientist writes "We've all been there: Our system is on the edge of death and we need to either fix it or retrieve important data that still remains hidden away in its dying clutches. LinuxDevCenter has a funny article on a heroic tale of a sysadmin relying on Knoppix to save the day. I for one, always make a boot disk in case of problems, but Knoppix can turn a bad day into a good one for just about anyone. Perhaps every administrator should have a Knoppix CD on reserve."
but how is this story "Hardware Hacking"?
Aw, fuck it.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
I have used knoppix and dd to migrate virtual machines from Virtual Server/Virtual PC to VMware. Now if that ain't a rescue, I don't know what is.
I suppose the moral of this story is to be careful when you play around with the dd command and your MBR.
DOY!
works like a charm to save data on corrupted windows boxes..
i just burnt myself a cd of knoppix-3.8 the other day, for just this reason! although i've had no reason to use it (yet), im hoping my system starts acting up soon so i finally have an excuse to use it :P
Enjoy an e-piphany
In case you need a smaller, Knoppix based, distro : Damn Small Linux is much smaller and is very good as a system rescue tool too.
A co-worker was trying to salvage some files from a dying Windows 98 machine. Win98 was having the damndest time accepting a USB memory drive (even with the right drivers installed). Five minutes with Knoppix and all his important files (mainly family tree stuff) was backed up to the USB memory drive.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
> Perhaps every administrator should have a Knoppix CD on reserve.
Duh? Let's hear some NEWS for nerds.
/* I'm going to be foftopic again, nevermind.*/ /. over the last months ? For God's sake, we really don't have anything else to talk about ?
./ users could come up with dozens of ways to rescue data with or without Knoppix, and most of us have some kind of rescue CD's. Do we really need Y.A.K.A. (Yet Another Knoppix Article) ?
I don't know, tell me, am I alone in feeling there were just one too many Knoppix-rescue articles on
I'm sure many hundreds of
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
...what's with the "Perhaps..."? IMHO, some kind of linux rescue cd is a sysadmin must-have.
I've used knoppix to recover both windows and linux systems for years. Whenever a windows install is too hosed to boot I'll use knoppix to get all the data moved over to another system (if it's a laptop). I've used knoppix to fix hosed lilo configs, recover data from hacked installs, etc. It's a great tool for any admin.
This story is over a month old. The story was origianlly posted Dec. 4, 2004.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
In addition, being a security engineer, I always have a copy of Auditor and a Knoppix STD "in case of emergency." Hey, you never know when you will be called on to...er, penetrate.
--Storm
Letting you do stuff and all. For the record, there are similar boot disks for NT environments that let you do the same thing, only with a mouse as god intended.
Not only Knoppix, but many of the new "live CDs" work very well for such rescues on hosed (Windows, and others) systems. I, myself, have used Knoppix, Mandrake, PClinuxOS and Mepis as rescue CDs (preferring Mepis, but that's just me), and I've seen Ubuntu, SUSE, and some others used in the same ways.
You're talking about rescuing a Linux system? I thought they were infallible?!
OK let me see if I have this straight.
Some "battle-hardened" sysadmin (who apparently doesn't to do regular backups... hmm...) salvages a few systems with Knoppix, and it's front-page news?
Must be a real slow news day.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I work in an all windows repair shop, with the only linux desktop. Knoppix, and Knoppix-STD have saved the day on many occasions, specially with NTFS, to save from having to pull the hdd out and put it in another machine. Can't beat network support for moving files around either.
Oh, come on, like you've never fouled anything up the first time you tried to play with it.
[insert witty sig here]
They just televised on of these rescues. The guy's knoppix had turned quite blue, as he had lost his trousers and the water was really cold.
For those of us without a floppy drive on our laptops (and no usb floppy drive) knoppix type live cd's are a god send , after many failed and funny kernel patches , i swear i would of gone totaly insane without the ability to boot knoppix,chroot and apt-get a replacment kernel
yes, but everyone does something profoundly stupid every once in awhile.
Knoppix is good for fixing the problem, regardless of whether the problem was caused by an ID10T error or an OS crash.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I've used bootable linux CD-ROM for many system saving tasks. Usually it is to fix windows machines that have been infected with a virus. A friend, neighbor, or coworker will be unable to boot due to some registry corruption or 'missing lsass.exe' virus corruption. Using knoppix I've been able to mount the NTFS file system and repair from a special hidden copy of the system hives.
I've also used Toms root boot disk - which is linux based but much smaller (designed to fit on a floppy).
Recently, I've been using Kanotix distro which was derived/inspired by Knoppix. Its debian sid based and includes many more drivers built in - my laptop wireless works out of the box with Kanotix and the ndiswrapper. It includes 'captive-ntfs' which lets me mount NTFS as writeable (important when modifying those registry hives). Kanotix website is in both German and English. I wont link to it since I haven't asked permission.
I recommend downloading it via bit torrent here.
Ditto!
I presume parent is some godlike person who never makes a mistake.
Where i work, at the University of Cincinnati, our "official" (official because it's what my boss favors, not because of university policy or anything) live distro is knoppix and it has certainly helped in situations where machines have been royally screwed up, for whatever reason. i've had better luck with mepis, hower. i find that it is faster and more compatible (especially with properly recognizing and using sound cards), and that it is also more fully featured. it makes a good install, too.
Yeah, but lotion seems to take care of that, after a little while.
Some guy rescues some data from a fubar'd system, writes about it in an article, and submits it to Slashdot. Repeat.
Don't get me wrong; Knoppix is useful for this kind of thing, but do we need to be reminded of it so often? Similarly, I am getting tired of finding the latest Microsoft bug posted to the frong page. We get it. Microsoft software is buggy. Can't you just make a "Microsoft BUGS" section so that I can ignore all those stories? They probably won't because that would cut their front page stories in half.
I for once, do not welcome "Heroic" as an adjective for such a small feat as to recover a partition table from Knoppix. Really, the "Heroic" adjective is a bit too much. How about the one who saved the Windows Server day by using a boot floppy then? Restoring a failing Windows install, THAT is heroism!
My young sister brought me her laptop which was probably the most compromised machine I'd ever seen: tons of adware, spyware, and viruses had made it almost unusable. I'd promised I'd fix it, but I couldn't even get it to boot to the point where I could rescue her files. I made some fixes so that I could boot it, but whenever I tried to copy her files to a special share on my Linux box, some virus would pop up and kill the connection before it was done. I was just about to give up, when I thought of booting up the computer with a Knoppix CD I had. So I did, and mounted her hard drive and tar'ed up all of her files and copied them to the Linux share. I scanned all of her files for viruses and whatnot on that computer while wiping her computer and reinstalling Windows. I wasn't able to convince her to switch to Debian, but I did install AdAware, Spybot S&D, Thunderbird, and Firefox, and hid all links to IE (I did install the "View in IE" extension for her, just in case).
She's gotten a new laptop since then, one which runs WinXP. But she's now a Firefox fanatic; she even asked for a Firefox T-shirt for Christmas. I'm so proud. Now if only she'd let me dual-boot her machine.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Sure, I make mistakes, as everyone else. But I try to make the mistakes on a test machine instead of a production server.
Those nice 50 meg gentoo install cd's can do the same thing! Hell just about any LIVE CD for that matter could.
bkw
...is that I can do stupid things without taking backups, and maintain my self-ascribed "battle-hardened admin" status, with only a single Knippix CD.
I'm sorry folks, but this story should serve as an example of what NOT to do.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
can you run a cluster with it?
Using Knoppix to rescue a non-booting system .. common, people, they teach this stuff on Blues Clues! Is this news for nerds?
I am not that smart, but I have never messed up a production system because I run test systems. Even if I did make a mistake, it would not be because I used an out of spec IDE cable. I keep backups of my data, too, especially if I am going to be messing with the partition information in anyway--even when using Partition Magic. The obvious stuff, you know, that everyone should do, like look both ways before crossing the street.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I've used knoppix a couple of times during my stay at a small tech-support (about 1000 computers supported) Often users came in with computers that didn't boot for one or another reason. It was really handy to just boot knoppix, save their important files to a usb-harddrive and just re-install their whole system.
I prefer the RIP ( Recovery Is Possible) CD for fixing/salvaging systems. It boots faster, supports BSD, and Linux filesystems and has only the tools needed for the job.
Now you know what to do with all those metal cans and lucite plastic mailers that the AOL CDs come in!
Load 'em up with Knoppix and stick in your travel bag, suitcase etc., so you always have one with 'ya!
Eh, we all do stupid things. Sure, ideally, he shouldn't have screwed up. But it's nice to know you can fix things when you do screw up.
He didn't make these mistakes on a production server either. The first was on his main workstation (not a server) and the second was on his laptop (also not a server).
Really, if you wanna flame him, you'd be safer pointing out that this is just some guy dicking around on his home machine and managing to not scrag his mp3 collection thanks to the wonder of Knoppix.
[insert witty sig here]
"The first and only time I experimented with out-of-spec IDE cables was on my main workstation."
And he had a reason for out of spec cables: he couldn't reach the connector on the motherboard.
For not reading GRUB parameters, well, there's just no excuse for that.
I just had a drive crash in a laptop. I couldn't get the windows disk to reformat or repartition my drive. Knoppix to the rescue. I repartitioned the drive and then that other OS was finally able to reformat and re-install. I now keep a Knoppix disk with me where ever I go.
I disagree. Every sysadmin I have ever known has made mistakes. Knowing how to bail yourself out is what makes you a great sysadmin. The person behind the previous post denies his/her own human qualities.
One other thing.... avoid doing dangerous admin commands when highly stressed or tired. I once deleted an entire directory I didn't intend to because I forgot the directory was hardlinked to another location.
As a result, 10 Virtual Servers, including a domain controller, suddenly blinked off. I had blown every one of them away in one misguided command.
Reality is Relative.
For what it's worth, it looks like the guy was experimenting with his workstation at home.
so.. in which fantasy land you don't have to make compromises?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
See my comment above: this was done on his personal workstation and his laptop respectively--not a production server.
[insert witty sig here]
Well, yea, fire is 'obviously' hot, but that doesn't stop people from playing with it. Until they get burned, at least.
Nothing is obvious until you have to go through it once.
To make a really extreme example: It seems obvious that a small chunk of ice flying at rediculous speeds could damage the leading edge of the Space Shuttle wing. Yet it still happened, and did we all call it 'obvious' before Columbia was lost?
A woman once gave birth in the back of my Knoppix CD--without a hitch!
Good stuff!
I have a Knoppix disk that I don't use. I run Slackware on everything, so, when I have a problem, i boot up bare.i with the Slack install disk and fix it that way.
Is there anywhere that I can download this that is not BitTorrent? I can't install Birtorrent at work. I hope someone can help me out here.
First of all, Virtual PC and WMware emulate different hardware. You might even have to recompile the kernel after "migrating", though you could probably get away with just removing and adding the correct modules. Secondly, I'm not sure how you would use dd to copy the disk. Both Virtual PC and WMware have their own different virtual disk image formats. I highly doubt you could just diretly copy the disk image and have it work. My best guess is that you booted up Virtual PC with the Knoppix live cd, use dd on the virtual disk to copy it to a physical disk or partition, then booted up VMware and copied the physical disk or partition to a VMware virtual disk image. If so, that sounds retarded. If not, tell me how you did it.
What spec should i look for?
Our 615s in the lab take forever to reboot.
So I have a Knoppix live cd that has XGalaga on it; MAN is that fun! Now I look forward to the reboots!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
OH MY GOD! CALL OUT THE MILITIA!!
Read it again. He didn't use the cable on a "production server", he used it on his workstation. And I suppose no sysadmin ever f'ed their partition table?
Damn. Lighten up.
I am quite fond of UBCD because it has a heap of floppy disk images that i can boot from on a CD ...
Like memtest86 and Ranish Partition Manager
Although it isnt a linux boot disk ( some of the earlier versions had RIP on it but im not too sure if it is still there ) it has saved my computer more than once.
Lima India November Uniform X-ray
I built a brand new system and took that drive out and put it into another XP system as a slave....no problems at all. Then we had a power failure. I have 9 computers in my house, many with several drives, every system was fine, with the exception of that one drive. XP decided that this drive was no longer formatted.
I took my lumps from the wife and began to look into data recovery. I tried SalvageNTFS, ScroungeNTFS and a demo from OnTrack. I forget the actual status that each tool reported but suffice it to say that none of them were successful and I just moved on. I did keep the drive though. A few weeks ago I stuffed it into what is to be a new webserver and put in a knoppix live cd. *poof* got everything back...every photo was recovered.
Can't explain it, but I'm keeping a Knoppix CD in my box of tricks from now on.
Since when does idiot-proofing do any harm?
Contains 130Mb of tools on a 50 MB ISO. Can run from RAM, so CD can be removed after boot.
"This guy should not be a sys-admin. First, he uses an IDE cable that is out of spec in a production server."
The guy clearly says that he only used out of spec IDE cables on his workstation.
^^
I often use knoppix to transfer data when i upgrade to a knew hard drive, since i have all my ide channels full i unplug my operating system hard drive, hook up the new data drive and copy the files from the old data drive to the new, works like a charm
We've all done the Linux and Win NTFS stuff by now, but what about PowerPC (Mac OS X)? Any 'live' distros that don't have to be installed to disk first?
My 120 gig Maxwhore drive died but I was still able to recover my unbacked up information using some tools it had. I was quite amazed at being able to recover them.
I have a stack of CDs, USB drives and pseudo mirror over the net.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Funny, just yesterday I blogged about some similar experiences...I had an XP box that would log me out as soon as I went to log in, and because all my passwords were blank some of the linux rescue CD based fixes wouldn't work...
I decided to just grab my personal files off (one rule I have is to put all my personal stuff in c:\data\ ) To make a long story short, Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD, at the recommendation of Enkidu on alt.os.linux, turned out to be a better bet for my needs, letting me shove the files onto my laptop over the network. (I'm proficient at both Windows and Unix commandlines but not too great as an admin on either, so maybe that has something to do with my problems with, says, system-down rescue cd linux)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Knoppix Hacks -- which has some nice tips & tools in it (even stuff you probably could have thought of but never bothered).
NOTE: I am not the author nor do I work for O'Reilly Publishing. Anyone who says otherwise is going to find out what I learned from the O'Really series.
Karma whorin' since 1999
The trick is, after you rsync the /cdrom directory to the master directory (see the book), cd to master/boot/isolinux and edit the isolinux.cfg file. Put your favorite cheat in the first APPEND line.
This worked for Knoppix 3.4 and up. Don't know about earlier versions.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
as a sysadmin for many years; you learn very quickly NOT to put anything valuable on the same drive that boots/manages the operating system.
/hda for booting/system and /hdb for *data*. if something screws up on any of the /hda partitions - you *reinstall* (or, try to recover it). bottom line is that none of your data gets messed up, because its on a *seperate drive* (note: not just seperate partition).
/etc/ files *sigh, those were the days*
i use
i even take it one level further now by putting anything i need (especially development tools/kits) as vmware disc images. this way, i can easily move stuff between machines - and, i just need to install vmware to get started (beats installing everything again).
operating systems should be something you can swap in/out without putting any of your valuable data at risk. hell, if you wanted to use a bootable linux from CD, and rom everything from a ram drive - why shouldn't you?
i wasn't sure how to interpret this article. first, a guy who screws up his own systems; then tries to get acclaim on the "recovery stories". did anyone miss the guy wrote a book on this as well? seems like a publicity stunt.
what happened to the old linux slackware days where all you needed was a boot and root floppy disc and you were all hunky dorey. nothing like vi'ing
If you're going to suggest a Knoppix-STD alternative, why not name one that's intended for data recovery and system restoration...
The only recovery disks that I've found worth using are a custom gentoo based live-cd and INSERT
Knoppix-STD or some other live disk is good for imaging and file recovery, but lacks real utility... like editing a windows 2000 registry, or doing vfat/ntfs hacking
Go Ahead, try INSERT (and yes, i know it's Knoppix Based)
The Geek in Black
I know my BCD's (when I'm Sober)
If you want your system to start acting up, just boot that 3.8. Considering that 3.7 is the newest released, there is likely to be a big suprise waiting in whatever you downloaded marked Knoppix 3.8.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
http://linuxiso.org/
Just out of curiousity, is there a way to use DD (or another utility) to make a copy of just a bootrecord. When I'm making images of windows drives I have to DD the entire partition, which doesn't work right if the destination partition isn't the same size as the original. A tar.bz2 of the OS drive works nicely, except that it's missing the bootsector...
I had always read about this happening to other guys, but never thought it would happen to me.
.
I was coiming into work early Monday morning knowing I had to reinstall everything on the secondary email server that went down on Sunday. I thought I would be the only one in, but Suzie from accounting had come in early too.
I always loved her emails when she needed some help. They were cheerful and she had clearly always researched the problem she was haveing rather than the normal "it just doesn't work".
She came up and told me when she booted up the system it wouldn't get past the initial Windows boot screen. She was wearing a tight baby blue collared shirt with a short black skirt. No stockings and black high heals. She leaned low and as I was looking at her black bra said in a slow sexy voice - "Can you fix it?"
That's when I pulled out my Knoppix . .
Problem: my 40 gig disk, over two years old, had been making a lot of noise. Then, one day, when I returned home, much to my horror, processor use was way up and I saw a lot of kernel read errors in xlogmaster's kernel monitor. Aieeeeee! Since the machine worked just fine otherwise, or at least earlier, I decided the damage wasn't big yet. Powered the whole thing down.
Then came the biiiiiig boring part.
I went to the store and picked up a nice 80 gig ATA133 disk.
Went to home. Old disks away. New drive in.
And BIOS didn't know anything about the drive. Some troubleshooting later it was clear that the BIOS was to blame. (A P3-600 from summer 2000...) And since this thing was getting pretty ancient anyway, rather than trying to upgrade the BIOS, I got a new motherboard. And processor. And fan. And memory. And eventually new power source. And then, on top of that, a chassis.
Then was the day when I finally had the critical parts. I booted up Gnoppix. (Luckily, there are CD burners on the university. Otherwise, there would have been even more chicken/egg-stuff here.)
Gnoppix was an excellent distribution to work with. On the old hard drive, I had been using reiser3 and ext2 (root partition); For the new hard drive, I had chosen to use xfs and ext3. And the surprising thing? Gnoppix supported both. Okay, it's been a while since I had used livecd distros, but still. There even was GNU parted, didn't need it yet though.
With Gnoppix I could easily copy the old disk contents to the new disk. Very, very little hassle. Luckily, no noticeable file loss occurred. I could even mess around to get grub reinstalled on the new drive. Booted it, and wham, it worked like charm, just like before it went down. Recompiled the kernel to match my new hardware and I was back in business - well, not really until I got the new chassis, but still.
BartPE makes bootable XP CDs. You can throw SOME your favorite antivirus and other utilities on there too. Is say SOME because some things just don't work well on such a system.
Mac users can use Charlessoft's BootCD.
Of course, BSD-live systems exist, and you can make a DOS live-CD too.
DOS or Linux + NTFS + CD support + USB filesystems + firewire filesystems + your favorite tools is a good, if minimal, combo. For more, add a ramdisk, a network stack, a web browser, and whatever network-filesystems clients your site requires.
Used Damn Small Linux make sure it has the dos tools. Set up the device to be bootable or to use a boot disk. :-P
Boot it.
At this point you can just wipe the drive and install linux
Or you can mount the dos drive and copy the files over.
I have a PC with the ability to boot USB and DSL is awesome. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
You can also put it on a micro CD or business card CD.
URL:http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/cd.html:
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
While we're on the subject of Knoppix, I love this tool(kudos to the dev team), but at the end of the day I don't have the damned clue how to use half the functionality of it, and I'm going to take a guess that it's that way for a lot of other techies, too. Someone really needs to get on the ball, and write up some documentation for it, talking about what the different tools are, what the best ones are for specific problems, etc. Though this thing really begs for a whole O'Reilly book on it just due to depth, the current lack of documentation really seems to be the biggest problem with it at the moment.
The slow speeds are because of your computer's speed. I can load it in about 5 mins tops.
Knowing it is a live cd (i.e. doesn't load from the hard drive), any files you create, unless saved onto a floppy or thumbdrive will be deleted upon restart. You should've done your research and experimented with it before you wrote an entire paper on it just to find out it would disapppear.
Knoppix saved files from my friends ::shudder:: WinME machine.
But if I remember correctly, this was a little over a year ago and I wasn't able to use this approach on an NTFS based system a few weeks later.
Has NTFS support improved? It would be critical for saving newer Windows boxes, even though I personally haven't had any serious issue with XP yet.
I burnt a copy of Knoppix for that simple home NTFS user who just wanted to surf the web and check webmail. They used that and just ignored their important files until I was able to fix their windows installation. After I showed them where the browser was, they no problem doing what they needed to do. Knoppix is damn cool.
http://brandonbloom.name
Except you'll look like a total idiot for carrying around AOL.
As soon as someone tells me they use AOL I stop listening.
-Tolerate my intolerance
No, the moral of the story is "don't be an idiot and use out-of-spec cables."
This was just an accident waiting to happen.
Last week I had another sysadmin hand me a stick of RAM and say "If it boots, it works". Knowing better, I ran memtest86 over the weekend on it. Lo and behold, I got several memory errors.
Sheesh, people. It helps to build systems properly. But that approach, alas, won't give you an article on the glories of Knoppix (even though they are well deserved).
Knoppix just takes way too long to boot and doesn't have some of the features that System Rescue does. Plus he's got a PPC version. I've use the PPC version to repair a OS X box (yes, they do crash too) and the Intel version to constantly recover user and Administrator passwords in XP. It's so easy with this disk!
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
I always keep a copy in a convienent location: www.knopper.net :-)
A friend of mine was having issues with a Toshiba laptop - it had been acting "oddly" for a while and after applying SP2 would no longer boot - but attempts to reformat and reinstall XP were failing as well. He was going to haev to send it off for weeks of repair.
I said that we might as well take a shot at booting Knoppix and see what worked, or if data could be recovered from the HD (not sure if he ever really reformatted or not).
Well, even Knoppix wouldn't boot! At first... after some fiddling we maanged to get to the most basic set of features, something to where we could run some utlities. At that point we were able to run a memory checker included with Knoppix, and lo and behold an uncountable flood of memory errors arose!
We simply unplugged the extra memory chip (which had been provided by Toshiba) and what do you know - it booted XP just fine like nothing had ever been wrong.
A month or so later Toshiba issued a recall notice on that laptop for having faulty memory chips... but Knoppix saved him a month of downtime for his laptop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This kind of crap gets on the front page and my Ask /. question regarding free open source slide based 2d simple effect programmable animation software on UNIX-like OSes ends up dismissed?! Who is moderating this? A monkey who makes decisions based on how many bananas it has left? I bet nobody will even bother to read this. Come on, mod this Offtopic or a Troll or whatever, it doesn't really matter, does it?
I LOVE Knoppix (and other Live CDs) but...
I used Qparted on Knoppix to resize some partions on two different dual systems.. nothing would boot after that.. Non of the 'tricks' to recover the MRB and anything else would work..
I was able to, at the very least, backup my data via Knoppix.. but then I had to completely WIPE the HDs clean and restall everything.
This is a known problem with Qparted.. I guess.. but it is not very well documented that this a huge problem.
"Really, if you wanna flame him, you'd be safer pointing out that this is just some guy dicking around on his home machine and managing to not scrag his mp3 collection thanks to the wonder of Knoppix."
That's the downside of MP3's. Easy to break. Hard to fix.
A couple of years ago I brought my new digital camera on a ski vacation, and I brought along my WinXP laptop so I could transfer my photos off the camera at the end of the day, freeing up the memory card. For the life of me, I couldn't get windows to recognize the camera as a USB mass storage device, which it had done previously. So I booted off my trusty Knoppix cd, and my computer recognized the camera without a problem. I never expected it, but in this case, I actually had better peripheral compatibility with linux than with windows. Thank you Knoppix!
Just this morning, mozingod had to come rescue my win2k workstation with knoppix to reset the local admin password.
*Somehow* my machine got deleted off of an AD domain so I coulnd't log on. Everything's been running so smooth with this machine - no, seriously - that no one, me included, knew the local admin password.
Knoppix to the rescue, 13 reboots later, I'm back in and the new admin password is 'asdf'.... I mean... it's really long and... un-crackable....
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I'm in the process of migrating my sister-in-law's computer from 2K to XP as I type this (clean install, upgrades never go well for me). First step back up the existing drive. Windows always seems to have a problem with this (files in use, hidden and system folders that it just can't see, etc) so the first step is to boot knoppix and cp -a the windows drive (mounted ro so no need for captive) onto a network share.
/var/spool/cyrus and scp it to my own box, and from there I used IMAP to push the mail onto the new mail server.
/etc/fstab and lilo so rather than swapping the drives back I just booted knoppix and fixed it that way (lilo -r /mnt/hda1, etc)
I know in theory I should only need to back up the Documents and Settings directory.. but this is Windows, documents and settings seem to end up getting saved all over the filesystem!
Last week a friend came to me with a hacked mailserver. It wouldn't boot at all but using knoppix I could easily rescue
Last month I moved Debian from a 20G drive to my bigger and slightly faster 40G drive. Copied all the files over but forgot to change
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Having Given up Linux years ago for BeOS and then MacOSX, I was a bit rusty on my concept of Linux Modules, but...
The Boss's XP Laptop recently carked it, and the data had to be retrieved.
He'd thrown away the Rescue Disk which came with his HP nx9000, and for some reason the Floppy Drive didn't work.
My first thought was to make the Laptop a Target Firewire disk and suck the data onto my iBook, a technique I used when an earlier iBook's Logic Board Failed, but the nx9000 doesn't support Target Disk Mode.
I eventually used Knoppix to boot the nx9000, mounted my iBook as a Target Disk (since Knoppix also read and writes HFS+) and copied the data to my Lappy.
I burned the whole lot onto a series of DVD-Rs, formatted the HDD of the nx9000 and presented the whole lot back to my Boss. I let him find a solution to the fact that *he* threw the System Restore Disks away.
If I was more familiar with Knoppix, I would have burned DVD-Rs of the data directly from the nx9000, but I prefer to use what I know.
Casually I was just reading this one from Alexander Viro, Linux hacker, VFS maintainer: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.r ecovery/msg/777b3992c628410a
Well we don't have any stories of sysadmins rescuing mainframes with knoppix.
Anyway osnews has a story on VMs and the OS
The mortgage broker, two floors up from us, was sold a "firewall/e-mail server that runs some kind of Linux". He was experiencing e-mail issues and tried to get the "vendor" to come out and service his "product". Unfortunately the vendor couldn't remember the root password to his own box. In addition, he wanted to charge the MB for more hours to re-install and configure it a second time.
/etc/shadow password file /etc/shadow file /etc/shadow file, replacing the old line
:-D
After NOT agreeing to the vendor's plan and showing him the door, the MB asked me if I could "crack into it" (yes, he actually used the right term). So... Knoppix to the rescue!
The following procedure worked well:
* 'mount' the HDD's main partition, rw
* From a shell prompt, enter 'su -' (in Knoppix this just drops you in, with no p/w required)
* Change the root passwd
* Make a backup copy of HDD's
* Copy the line for the root user in the Knoppix
* Paste it into the HDD's
* Profit.
Also noted that there were no users created (the vendor had been logging into Gnome as root to do everything). So added an user account with sudo 'ALL=(ALL) ALL' rights, etc., etc.
It was a strange way to find a new customer
Based off DSL but nicer in terms of included programs is Feather Linux. It's 14mb more, but unless you're putting it on an actual business card cd it's well worth it for the extra apps.
And for an in between option where the business card distros don't quite have enough, try SLAX. Can do more or less anything that knoppix can, but only includes one program for any one job.
I am trolling
This guy screwed up, period.
If you're incompetent enough that overcoming the consequences of that incompetence is considered an act of heroism, then you really need to find another line of work.
So will it not be able to access your HD at all? I was under the impression that it could still read your NTFS drives or whatever windows formats it as? I last played around with Linux five years ago with Mandrake as dual boot but had no real need for it, but would like to play around with it again, was thinking about one of these live CD's but if it can't save to your HD (i know it boots off the cd) then I'll probably not bother. I vaguely remember mandrake was able to still mount your dos partitions, but then they were FAT and it wasn't booting from cd. Any info appreciated.
I was doing contract work for the Phoenix Foundation in Central America trying to rescue some Noble Prize Laureates from the evil clutches of HITT and I entered quite a jam. Murdock was on my tail and Jack was weighing down the hot air balloon with the money stole in yet another classic Jack Dalton "get rich scheme".
Lets just say that I made Jack leave the money, but alas, I couldn't get the hot air balloon (made out of my ego and Penny Parkers panties.) To take off. I needed a malleable object suitable to direct more hot air into the balloon to lift me off the ground and get back into the air space of a friendly country.
I remembered back to my childhood and something that Harry said. He said that when you are in a pinch, always carry your swiss army knife, and your network administrator's swiss army knife, Knoppix.
I snapped out of my halluiogenic state (from living on a houseboat) and melted down the KNOPPIX disc. It sealed the leaks in the tank, Thank God.
The balloon sailed away and the cancer researchers were safe, Jack was upset that he didn't get his pirate loot, and somehow I made some sort of Social commentary along the way.
All of this was possible thanks to Knoppix. Speaking for the Nobel Laureates, the Phoenix Foundation, I would like to personally thank Klaus and the members of the open source community for their help.
Sincerely,
Mac, er, iago.
Worst Sig Ever
Forgot to mention: BECAUSE of Knoppix, and its ilk, the servers we build and sell support loop-AES, exclusively!
(i.e. When you go to mount the HDD from Knoppix, it looks like a bunch of garbage and Knoppix refuses to mount it).
STUX, a live cd with pretty much everything, but very "heavy", only for 256mb+ machines
Knoppix STD, primarily because it's still the best for working wireless cards. Also some mp3s on the cd to listen to, and some fiddling with mkisofs means that from non-nix OSes it looks like that's all that's on the cd
SLAX, plus a few modules. I like modularness and I really really like ovlfs - basically you can treat the cd like a normal filesystem, and install new programs on it or anything.
Austrumi - simply AMAZING 50mb business card CD. Full versions of abiword, gnumeric, mplayer, the GIMP, Opera, nmap, skype, and more on the linux boot, plus they've included aida, chntpw etc. all on the 50mb cd
Finally, MoviX for some relaxation when I've finished fixing systems.
I am trolling
I had just finished burning the latest Knoppix CD on a hot summer afternoon when my cat jumped into my wifes unsuspecting arms, and they both tumbled backwards out the window.
I launched myself out, CD still in hand, trying to catch her from a 7 story drop - and lo and behold if both my wifes and my cats lives weren't saved because of the strength length and durability of a Knoppix CD.
After everything was said and done, we tried the (amazingly unscratched!) CD out in my wifes computer (she wanted to thank it for saving her) and it worked flawlessly.
Thanks Knoppix!
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
I usually just stick in CD#1 of any linux distro that is sitting around - I just did this with Fedora Core 3 last week. Once the insall begins, I just switch to another terminal, mount my FS and make the changes I need to reboot the box.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Since when does idiot-proofing do any harm?
Isn't that another term for DRM.
You can access your hd and view all its files under the NTFS format. A program called captive NTFS, I forget where it's listed, will allow you to write to them also. Thus giving you a hd to save things to. If you're interested in learning about doing a lot of things with knoppix, I definately recommend picking up "Knoppix Hacks" by Kyle Rankin. Has 100 tips for both the casual user (like me and you) to people who needs it for emergency purposes inlcuding how to setup knoppix as an emergency webserver, router, etc. Also, tips for backing up and reformatting are included. As a matter of fact, I recently used it to 'shred' my hard drive to prepare it for a reinstallation of windows. It can come in very handy if you know how to use it properly.
I'm starting to ask people for permission to set up their boxes to dual-boot to Linux. Linux is so usable now that, unless there's a specific application that they can't get an equivalent on Linux. I really don't see much need for most home users to stay with MS Windows.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
While I am a big fan of Knoppix, my prefered tool for system rescue is System Rescue CD: http://www.sysresccd.org/ A great collection of tools and the ISO burns to a mini-cd!
I once accidently deleted the /boot directory and obiously couldn't boot the machine. I did have everything backed up on CD-Rs. So I'm thinking, great I'll just boot with Knoppix and restore everything back. Little did I know.
Anyway, I had to kill all the processes and rmmod all the modules, in order to unmount the Knoppix CD. Which wasn't easy at all, because as soon as you try to run some program the Knoppix distro tries to access the CD. And so you get some of the modules flagged as busy and you have to wait to remove them. Arrhh!!!!
Thanks for the info!
The Knoppix CD has completely replaced the traditional DOS bootable diskette as the first emergency PC tool. I'm pretty sure that many at Microsoft routinely use it, but they'll never admit it ( ever tried to use the M$ recovery console ? ).
About four or five months back, I used Knoppix to rebuild the boot record for my main HD when it got totally horked, allowing me to copy about five years worth of personal files and data to a backup drive temporarily while I reinstalled WinXP.
(*sigh*)
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
... is a CD labeled "backup 2005-01-11".
/reading/ that much data takes forever.
/do/ need a rescue CD, usually (but, alas, not always) to make systems bootable rather than to recover data, I tend to use SystemRescueCD.
Granted, that's not always practical. As someone who has to admin and backup a system with a 1.25TB RAID array, I know that all too well. SDLT? Daily SATA hard disk snapshots? Even
My solution - periodic off-site hard disk backups plus DDS-4 dailies. If I can go to LTO dailies soon, I'll be happy.
When I
i.e. - Install XP to one partition, and then seamlessly have your "Documents and Settings" be on another partition? That way you get independence of OS from data for XP. I'd hope there was a way to do that as simply as "mount" on unix so that you don't have to fuss with Environment variables, and half the programs don't actually work correctly with D&S off the main drive.
Linux badly needs lossless re-partitioning and tools
to seemlessly dual-boot along with win98/2k/etc.
Its really curious how they still rely on old MS-DOS
utilities and assume Win-usage to get alot of maintenance tasks accomplished.
Just last month my Dad's PC with Windows XP Home Compaq PC that he runs a small business had a hard drive go bad. The drive was slowy going bad and giving errors.. but he didnt know what to do. Then one day it just stopped... the machine was fried.... Boot sector was bad.. none of the Windows XP recovery tools could save his install
Then I came along and saved the day.. was able to boot to Morphix Linux, mount his drive, ftp all his files for his business checking account to another pc and then save the day.
I bought a new hard drive and reinstalled everything in a few days... Thanks to Morphix He didnt loose anything..
I have a probably very classic story: A colleague of mine ignored the bios message of the kind "Disk error - press any key to continue", which nevertheless made the machine boot into Win2K for some while ... until it stopped. I could convince our sysadmin not to try to rescue the installation by installing XP over it. He was really convinced this would give him the chance of accessing the NTFS-partition. Running knoppix and clicking on "Start samba server" made it incredibly easy to save the data. And naturally the disk was never useable again after a trial to install XP over it. Nothing could ever access it again.
Another really good thing with Linux is that it makes recovery of anything, (even Windows), so much easier. It's good to see articles like this just to show how very easy it is.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
i normally use Slackware for my main distro, but i do keep an extra disk partition specificly for testing and playing with other distros, mostly just for curiousity, and many times i and/or the distro i happen to be using will bork my mbr and i end up using Knoppix to chroot my slckware and running /sbin/lilo in a root su terminal to my lilo back...
I've been using Pebuilder for my recovery needs with great success.
It's easy to customize with plugins that you can create, download, and add. The UBCD for Windows is a must have for pebuilder and makes it a real powerful tool. from browsing to e-mail, web browsing, disk recovery and lots more. I basicially used one of these CD's as my PC's OS while I was waiting for Dell to send me a new hard drive when the one in my machine at work crashed.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I highly recommend downloading a copy of the Ultimate Boot Disc as well. This one's saved a couple of systems for me. It has a great collection of low level disk tools, including hard-drive manufacturor specific tools. I keep a copy of both the UBD and Knoppix by my computer at all times.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Blues clues? thats rather amazing, my niece watches that show all the time, maybe i should ask her about it...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Live CD's are lifesavers in that situation.
I can think of two places where a Knoppix CD has saved me time and effort. Sure, I could have done these things other ways, but, well, why not?
The first was back in high school, a couple years ago. Of course, our network was authenticating through a central server, and it that server went down, or the network went down, you couldn't log in. And, as always, someone always saves their important files (If they're important, why don't they have a backup? I don't know) to the hard disk. Just in time for our server to go down. And naturally the 'system admin' didn't know a damn thing about it. The actual admin couldn't come in for a while, so it looked like the file wasn't going to get looked at that day.
Funny how things like that are life-or-death when you're in school.
Short story long, I pulled out a Knoppix disk I had sitting around, and just pulled up the file. Emailed it to the guy so he could work on it from home, and promptly returned the computer to a useless state.
Story two is a better one. I've just moved about 700 miles, and I'm crashing on a friends couch until I can find a place with a ceiling of my own. Naturally, a Windows Update hosed her XP install, and though she had a properly partitioned drive, she wasn't storing anything on the storage partition. I downloaded Knoppix, burned it on my iBook, and booted her machine off it to format the storage section nicely, then bring all her documents over.
She's got a dual boot system now. Fedora and XP. The best part? She asked me to install it so that she could play with it.
People are using knoppix for this all the time; I can tell by the amount of email I deal with on the subject.
Here's a true Knoppix rescue story.
My main PC power supply dies, leaving only the backup computer. I thought, Hmmm, I'll stick the HDs in the backup and boot from this Knoppix cd and check the HDs are OK.
Knoppix Boots, locks up, does f*ck all. Yep, terrific stuff there!
(The HDs were fine btw)
My laptop's registry hive file got corrupted about 3 months ago. With the MS boot disk my only option was to re-format and start from scratch. I DL'd Knoppix on the advice of a friend and was able to ftp all of my necessary files to a network location here at work and then I re-formated and off I went. God Bless Knoppix... don't leave home without it.
It's Pamela Jones, not Paula.
Unknown host pong.
My grandfather's always had trouble with his computers. He brought one over when he came for Thanksgiving. I cleaned it up, got it working again...only to have him somehow hose it a week after he got home. He brought it (and a new computer) when he came for Christmas. The older box was completely hosed. XP wouldn't start up at all. Either it'd freeze on a grey screen or freeze on an XP logo (when in safe mode). He needed his files transfered to the new machine.
So, I decided to try out the Bart Pre-installed Environment, which I had learned about at work. It was just what I needed to pull files off of a screwed NTFS XP install. I built an image, booted the machine with it...but it wouldn't find the NIC. So, I built another image with the drivers specifically for the NIC, and Nero, just in case. Still didn't work. Tried a variety of network combinations. Nothing. Oh, and Nero crashed when I tried to do anything worthwhile with it (to be fair, the Nero loader was designed for an earlier version of the software). Tried to build it with drivers for a USB stick. No go.
Out of desperation, I torrented the newest Knoppix ISO, burned it, and booted the dead machine with it.
Now, Knoppix has always scared me a bit. I'm not a Linux guy; I'm mostly lost in it, even with a GUI, and Knoppix has so much crap in its menus that I hardly knew what to use or how to use it.
But, anyway. It worked. Flawlessly. Networked right off the bat. CD burner worked great. USB keys detected fine. The three hours and half-dozen CDs I wasted with BartPE could've been eliminated if I had just gone with Knoppix from the start. BartPE might be a great, free (of a sort) preinstalled environment, but it just seemed completely hacked together and half-assed to me. Knoppix blew it out of the water.
Take off openoffice, the games, and the fancy default GUI. Put on more rescue tools. Make a version that is more tech oriented.
I don't think you can move the entire D&S tree, but you can move an entire user profile via the user control panel, or you can relocate the user's "My Documents", and even give it a decent folder name, though XP will still refer to it as "My Documents" all over the place :(
Where I work the "security manager" has decided to block these utils (memtest, knoppix) as 'hacker tools'. We can't download them and aren't allowed to use them.
They're also about to ban ssh since he thinks we can get viruses that way. On the other hand Outlook and IE reigns supreme on the windows desktops.
Don't you just love "corporate policy"?
I was just using knoppix to fix one of the company directors PC's
Weird timing
One day a bus full of nuns crashed into a burning orphanage.
I rushed to the scene with Knoppix and managed to save several servers.
That was a great Knoppix rescue
All persons perished in the flames though.
while the system requires temp files to be in this area; there is no reason why you dont have shortcuts to other drives within these directories. i never store anything in this area of the drive; if i need to re-install anything, i double check that i can export the setting to a file and have the ability to re-import them.
if you are stuck with files in D&S, maybe its time to have a task running regular backups to another drive just to make sure *g*
I was asked once to recover a windows 2000 laptop for a colleague.
His wife had booted a partition magic cd and accidently moved the windows partition over, causing a new partition to be created at the beginning of the disk. For some reason, partition magic wouldn't move the damn thing back.
Apparently, a DOS/Windows MBR always tries to boot the 1st partition. So when booting the machine, all we were getting were "no bootable disk" errors...
But, I had an idea.
I booted a knoppix cd and created a c:\grub directory. I copied grub files to it and configured a menu.lst to boot the 2nd partition, (where Windows 2000 was stuck at). Lastly, I installed grub to the MBR. After I rebooted, the grub boot menu came up with the "Windows 2000" option I had created. I hit enter and it loaded Windows 2000!
My colleague had no idea what I had just done, but was happy otherwise and no longer mad at his wife.
-Joe
No problem.
I used Knoppix on a half-dead laptop to rescue personal files for someone. Knoppix and a large thumbdrive. A handy combination.
I did that once. I had My Documents actually pointing to a samba share. It worked fine until one day the samba share wasn't available, and the My Documents shortcut disappeared forever.
My girlfriend's laptop had its Windows system die in ways I'd not thought possible (though being windows it shouldn't have surprised me). It not only wouldn't boot but also would crash before allowing access to the recovery console. I couldn't even do a clean install and there were important files (all of her work since eighth grade) that couldn't be lost. As it was a laptop I couldn't take the hard drive out to run as a slave in another computer without voiding the warranty. I tried a Knoppix cd my brother had and without having used Linux beyond the basic interactions of surfing the web and doing work I was able to get the system going and burnt all of her important files to cd's. After doing that i was safe to wipe the drive. I was so impressed that I jumped into Linux headfirst and installed Debian on an old box I had. So not only did Knoppix save my girlfriend's files, it also got me onto Linux.
Its doesn't pack as many tools as Knoppix, but BartPE can be extremely useful for getting at busted 2000/XP/2003 boxes.
Personally, I would strongly recomend "fussing" with those environmental variables, rather than doing these things in a way Windows doesn't handle properly.
However, there certainly is a way to do it, if you're hell-bent on doing things the wrong way, for no good reason.
I can't say if this functionality exists in XP home, or just the pro/server versions... As of Windows 2000, in the disk manager, you can chose to mount a drive as a directory of another drive, just like Unix mounts (the innovation from Microsoft boggles the mind, doesn't it?).
It's very easy to do. Right-click on the partion on the drive, and choose "Select Drive Letter" or whatever it's called lately. That should pop-up a box that lets you choose between mounting as a drive, and mounting as a directory. Trivially easy from there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I had a similar problem as that guy, also caused by immoral use of the dd command. Testing another OS and its partition, I was playing with dd, and had images of other small partitions as gzipped files so I could dd them into the standard 10mb partition I had.
.tar.bz2 file in the root folder, and existed in pieces in other folders. I never could recover data from the / folder, but pieced data from others. Also, all folders somehow appeared in the root folder so an 'ls /' showed a large number of random-string directories, but they had good filenames inside them. So a whole lotta grepping and searching, and reconstructing the filelist.
But I misfired and did dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1, and things deteriorated. This XFS drive had all my collected files, years worth of data, so for the next week I embarked on educating myself about XFS's structures.
The XFS partition had two superblocks and the first one was deleted. I had to find the second one, and grep its signature. Use that superblock, overwrite the first (repaired) one, then run xfs_repair to bring the system back to life.
My backups were in a
The very first task I did after the 'mistake' was to get a larger disk, dd the crashed partition into a file, and then start fixing the partition. Any mistake I made, I could undo simply by dding back the partition from the file. But I learned new respect for dd. Its a loaded gun with a loose trigged, so NEVER point it anywhere you dont intend to shoot.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Better yet, don't put anything valuable on the same computer that boots/manages the operating system...
Sounds to me like you're using vmware for no good reason. You could, quite easily, install all your programs (and libraries, and headers, etc) into a directory, in some arbitrary location on your hard drive, and just copy that directory from system to system.
I also can't see how your method could possibly be any good, because under vmware, you're going to be running yet another OS anyhow, so now you have two OSes running on top of each other, and twice as much that could go wrong. Where's the advantage, I don't see it?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Great quote, though!
Wikileaks, no DNS
> yes, but everyone does something profoundly stupid every once in awhile.
indeed (and i'm going to post anonymously to save myself the embarassment)... because this is a true story.
only the other day, on a *remote* server, i installed a kernel that didn't have support for xfs (which happened to be my primary filesystem type on all drives). you can imagine my distress when i rebooted..
needless to say, knoppix did me me no favours that day.
I always wonder why those blokes in service shops (you know - places where you service used computers and stuff) usually never have even heard of Linux (not to mention Knoppix or Live CD). Every time I visit them (hey I live in Poland - we have a lot of old computers here :) - somehow, I like it) and boot Linux (f.e. from CD because my drive bay went off or smth.) they are shocked...
:) When you need Knoppix (KDE and stuff - I am just to lazy to pass parameters on command line or to master the disc sysrescd does that for me) and GUI to rescue anything don't bother... Rescue is always last resort of keeping the data safe.
LiveCDs are great for diagnosing - but I would not recommend Knoppix - it is bloated, Knoppix is rather for presentation of Linux to newbies. Systemrescuecd (use Google) is quite good. It contains loads of usefull utilities like AIDA (hardware detection/report) for DOS, dban (for shredding all data on disk - I like it), full blown Linux 2.6 based distro - only console/fb apps - but most of essential stuff. Look if you are going to rescue anything you should have a clue what you are doing.
I do wish there were USB-key based distros that were easy to set up (there is at least one based upon Damn Small Linux, a derivative of Knoppix, but I've never been able to get it work); I have seen bundled DSL or other based rescue setups preconfigured on USB memory keys but not an easy-to-install downloadlable version.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well, I've never fscked up my partition table, just my bootloader... numerous times.
With the amount of times I install/reinstall OSs on my desktop (which pentuple-boots (that's 5, right?)) with only 2 of the OSs staying constant the rest changing as I find OSs I want to play with, I've basically given up on keeping the boot loader in tact.
Instead, I threw grub on a floppy and just leave the floppy in the drive and let the OSs fsck with the boot sector all they'd like.
but a live CD is something that could be abused quite a bit by really bad people. (ex) FBI raids your residence, they confiscate your machine, it has no hard drive since you are using a live cd that then connects to some arbitraty server to store files that need to be written. Sure traffic flowed from your computer and you did stuff, but its not on your computer.... I am still working things out how one could customise the live cd to do the things you would want but this is thankfully under the radar (well till I opened my mouth)
LILO sounds better for that...
IMHO
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
So what is it with all these dead drives? Why are they all giving up?
:-/).
I've tried W2K and WNT (but not XP).
One of the things about W2K/WNT that horrified me on the first time (and every other time) I booted it up was the long loud disk-grinding noises -- not just from the hd that carried the OS but also from every other physical disk on the system. WTF? How many times do you need to try the hds and fds when you boot an OS? None of the win websites I looked at seemed to have any explanation for this excessive disk activity, nor any tips for how to stop it. So I just don't regularly use them, keep one aside for occasional test/diagnostic use and that's it.
My personal vote stays with a dual-boot linux and W9x system. DOS used to go very gently on the hardware, W9x and linux seem to hit it harder than DOS did, but nothing like the intensity that W2K seems to throw at it. After over 15 years' using hard-disks, so far none of my own disk hardware failed, all supersedure has been for reasons of disk-size (hm, better check those backups
Btw I really like and use Knoppix for s/w hangups.
-wb-
"Perhaps every administrator should have a Knoppix CD on reserve."
Yeah... just in case she runs out of cup pads...
Did I mention that none of the Knoppix CDs i tried in the last two years ever booted on my Debian box?
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
The first time Knoppix saved me was during finals week my sophomore year of college. For some unknown reason, the MBR of my hard drive screwed up randomly. I didn't have time to reinstall Windows, so it allowed me to continue checking my email and working on final projects until I was able to do a full recovery during break.
Another time it "saved me" was when the hard drive and case shipped later than everything else for my new computer. I ran Knoppix on that computer, which sat in a cardboard box, for a week and a half as I waited for the rest of the parts to arrive.
Can you hard link directories?
One of our management brought his wife's home busniss systems in and after I verifyed a bad sector on the dard drive - which forced Dell to honour its warranty with a replacement drive - I used Knoppix to boot the system and burn a few CDs of all the data that was on the failing disk. This was just weeks before Spinrite 6 was released that works on NTFS drives. It was nice that it had the boot CD the older CDROM type and the second CD the CDRW type. I rebuilt an old system at home like this just so I can pop bad hard drives in and charge customers for data recovery!
zenray
So one day I double-click on an MP3 file. Windows Media Player launches and asks if I'd like to install the update that's available. Sure, why not? Partway through the install it locks up. The machine freezes. Nothing. I reboot. Blue screen. Over and over. I boot in safe mode. Blue screen. I boot Knoppix. No problem. I copied my important files off to another box. I take the laptop to IS. They try rescuing it with an XP cd. Blue screen. They try an outdated version of Sysinternals ERD. Blue screen. They run memtest or something like it. No problems. They give it back to me. I boot Knoppix and copy the rest of everything I might possibly want off of it. An hour with Google and trying to copy Windows Media Player files from a working box gives me nothing but the same blue screen. I get a *ahem* trial version of Sysinternals latest ERD. Bluescreen. I gave it to IS to re-Ghost.
If it wasn't for Knoppix, I'd have sworn that I had a hardware problem. It definately impressed the Windows-heads in IS.
Perhaps every administrator should have a Knoppix CD on reserve.
s/every administrator/everyone/
We sysadmins [should] have been using them long ago :)
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
I just wasted 4 days struggling with WinXP boot disks, network installs, NTFS for MSDOS, and voodoo dolls to try to rescue 40 Gigs of data from a nearly dead drive. The drive didn't show up at all when plugged in. Some rescue tools could see the data but not retrieve it or copy it. Four days of tearing apart machines and trying anything I could download.
Then I read this Slashdot article. Downloaded Knoppix. Burned a CD. Booted from the CD. Everything auto-configured: nearly-dead disk, network, everything. I could see ALL my files! Mounted a huge drive from a good machine over the network. Dragged all my files from the nearly-dead disk to the good disk on a different machine. Done. Saved.
Struggle with Windows products: 4 days.
Download Knoppix: 1 hr.
Burn CD: 5 minutes.
Save data: 5 minutes.
Thank you.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
A friend's windows laptop was infected with viruses and spyware so badly she couldn't even get on the network (our univ. boots off machines that show a lot of outgoing malicious traffic). No amount of Virex/Adaware could get rid of everything, so I just said "Fuck it" and burned and inserted a Knoppix CD. I showed her how to use Mozilla, Konqueror, OpenOffice, and gAim and she has only gone back once. I didn't want to fool around with the NTFS-write hack, so she saves all her documents to a network disk. It was supposed to be a temporary measure that ended up being sufficiently good as to become essentially permanent. If you want to convert people to Linux, have them start using it as a stop-gap measure the next time something goes horribly wrong, and then never do anything about it.
There are three main bootable CDs (amonst a few others) that are in my software toolkit at all times: Knoppix, The Ultimate Boot CD, and The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows XP. All three are invaluable diag/repair tools.
I've tried to use Knoppix to recover Windows files in the past and could never figure out why it wouldn't recognise the USB Key. Now I know to insert it BEFORE booting.
So thankyou for a great guide!
Visceral Psyche Films
I'm guessing that the Knoppix CD that he's talking about is Knoppix STD. I don't know of a better rescue disk...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
PEBuilder (and 911 Rescue CD) are among the only legacy MS Windows-based rescue bootable CDs I'm aware.
Both of them suffer from a number of disadvantages compared with Linux-based bootable CDs:
Sure, there are Windows-related repair and recovery tasks best accomplished from within a Windows environment. But the tools are far more limited than the equivalent Linux tools.
More on this at WindowsRescueDisk.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
BartPE is also great, when it helps to have a Windows-based Live CD.
.iso
You need a Windows XP SP1 CD to build the Live CD
Great for many reasons but especially because you get reliable read/write NTFS access.
I have a 160 GB drive on my new Compaq, but that entire drive was a single partition. The restore DVD that comes with the computer won't allow me to create multiple partitions, either. I wanted to make multiple partitions without hurting the existing data.
Rather than buying a copy of Partition Magic to use one time, I Googled and found that the Knoppix includes QtParted, which is easy to use and fairly reliable for resizing partitions. The key with the (Compaq) restore disk is that it puts all the data (OS and numerous apps) on the drive and then has to reboot. When it reboots, it stretches the partition out to the size of the entire drive - I guess so the same restore disk can be used on models with drives that are different sizes.
I simply slipped the Knoppix CD in before rebooting from the restore disk. I used QtParted to stretch the initial partion out a little bit, and added two more partitions for the rest of the drive. It worked like a charm!
Of course, I put another drive in the computer for Linux. I'm a longtime Debian user, but decided to give Ubuntu a try. It's great so far!
man i tried to give my school administrator a copy of STD and whoppix once, and he saw the fancy shmancy disk labels i put on them, (aka, kissass) and thought "ON NO! HACKER! VIRUS! PENGUIN! LINUX! EVIL!"...im sure he did, and declined my disks...and since i used some of my lunchtime to talk to him, i met the roaming hallway bullies and got beat up! >:( so i'd have to say knoppix ruined my day...damned disk labels..(just kidding. i love knoppix. it was one of my first.)
I've used Knoppix to search the Microsoft Knowledge Base and also look for their tech support number.
In many places, big datacentres specially, Systems Administrators have no physical access to the machines they administer.
Under those circumstances to have a rescue CD is , er, stupid and unnecessary.
There are many kinds of Systems Administrators, don't give recipes that you think apply to everybody because more often than not they don't
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... are waiting for?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have a dell inspiron 8500. When I tried to install Knoppix to the harddrive, it stalled at 85% and failed on the verification. I would LOVE to have Knoppix on my harddrive as it has much of what I like about it. Any help? Even the latest one (the best one yet 3.7) is having the same problem. I don't know why. Email me at Taliesinsmandolin@tmail.com if any solutions.
Story.. I have XP and Linux Redhat Enterprise 3.0 installed on separate partitions. If you ever end up having to reinstall windows XP (oh yes, nightmare! please), the bootmanager makes a pain in ass because it windows' doesnt recognize any other operating systems. A method to beat the window Bootmanager. Get windows totally set up how you want it. Then reboot, and boot the Redhat installation CD from the CD drive. Then when asked to partition, choose the manual partition. Edit the patition that you previously had linux on, and identify it as / , and when it asks you to format, chose DO NOT FORMAT. Then click on SWAP partition, and again, chose not to format it. Then go through the normal installation processes (yes this takes time but is harmless to your data), and then when done, viola!! Linux GRUB is back as your primary Installer. NExt, you need to go back into Redhat and mount the different partitions back. mount -t ext(2 or 3) /dev/hda(number) /mnt/hda(number) if another linux partition
usually helps.
then doublecheck with the command cd /mnt/hda*number) then ls to verify content is mounted
email at Taliesinsmandolin@tmail.com
Just FYI--and maybe you know this and just hit the comma by accident--it's "1.000" not "1,000". Batting averages (for example, .182, .300, or 1.000) use periods, not commas, because they are the result of dividing hits by at-bats. 4 / 4 = 1.000. 2 / 4 = 0.500. Etc. :)