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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 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!!!
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.
Oh, come on, like you've never fouled anything up the first time you tried to play with it.
[insert witty sig here]
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
Yeah, but lotion seems to take care of that, after a little while.
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]
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.
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.
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)
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 . .
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.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
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
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).