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."

Comments

I use it on crapped on WIndows boxes too..

[Anonymous Coward]

works like a charm to save data on corrupted windows boxes..

Re:I use it on crapped on WIndows boxes too..

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

works like a charm to save data on corrupted windows boxes..

1. INDEED! I've saved several millions of dollars worth of info by booting NT* servers with a Knoppix CD (or Gentoo before they dropped samba support from the live CDs). I was praised as a herald. Nope. It's not me. I just used the right tool for the right job. Recovering a Windows system with Windows is near impossible.
2. 
   
   Aside, I use Linux bootables (Gentoo mostly) for checking the life of my HDs. I run a Gentoo machine (installed near 3 year ago). hda has seen a LOT (even before I put Gentoo on it - it was an MDK drive after it was a Win* drive). I've noticed SMARTd telling me latley that his life may be running short these days, but, after a e2fsck, it's fine. /me shrugs. I still need to replace him regardless.
   
   It's only a 10G drive (I have 4 others, much larger, in this box), but he needs to be replaced soon.
   
   Aside, I've saved a LOT of Win* Servers / laptops / desktops with "Live CD's".
   

Re:I use it on crapped on WIndows boxes too..

[dasunt]

I've noticed SMARTd telling me latley that his life may be running short these days, but, after a e2fsck, it's fine. /me shrugs. I still need to replace him regardless.

Er, yes.

SMART handles stuff such as "this drive takes several tries before reading the right data" or "this drive has remapped a lot of bad clusters lately". Its much more than filesystem integrety checking, and even if fsck is fixing your problems now, you might want to see why smart is pestering you.

More Info

Damn Small Linux

[tuxliner]

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.

Other distros work, too

[gardyloo]

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.

RTFM

[BaldGhoti]

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.

Re:Why is this a story?

[geekman]

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.

INSERT

[EnigmaticSource]

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)

Re:DD and boot records?

[Macrobat]

Just out of curiousity, is there a way to use DD (or another utility) to make a copy of just a bootrecord.

Oddly enought, I found out the answer to that last night (and I wasn't even asking about that particular problem):

dd if=/dev/hda of=hda.mbr bs=512 count=1

Got that from this site. So take their word for it, not mine.