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 once saved the day with Knoppix

[Rude Turnip]

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.

Re:I once saved the day with Knoppix

[advocate_one]

Christmas at my Daughter's house... her machine was playing up and I'd bought her a 256Mb USB Keydrive to use to keep her important data on...

cut a long story short... how the heck do you install a USB key drive onto a win98 system that has no internet connection and the driver files are only to be found on the USB drive that win98 recognises as new hardware, but won't actually scan it for the drivers as it hasn't allocated it a drive letter yet... well, Knoppix saved the day and allowed me to get the drivers copied off to a fresh directory on her hard drive so that win98 could then find them...

She now wants me to set it up dual boot for her as she was mightily impressed with how far Linux has come in the few years since she last played with it (Mandrake 7.2)

My dead drive

[superid]

I had a slave drive with about 4GB of family photos. This included years of photos of my kids, and many irreplacable photos of my wifes mother who has since passed away. [ this is known as foreshadowing ]

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.

HOWTO: Recovering the root Password

[soloport]

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.

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 /etc/shadow password file
* Copy the line for the root user in the Knoppix /etc/shadow file
* Paste it into the HDD's /etc/shadow file, replacing the old line
* 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 :-D

One More Important Thing

[soloport]

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).