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Debian Software Linux

System Recovery with Knoppix 270

Posted by michael from the handy-stuff dept.
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."
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System Recovery with Knoppix More

System Recovery with Knoppix

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  • Yes, but.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:02AM (#10543120)
    What if the Linux that you can't boot already is Knoppix? Can you swap this recovery CD with your regular Knoppix CD during the boot process?

    • Re:Yes, but.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:15AM (#10543154)
      For those not in the know, "Knoppix is a GNU/Linux distribution that boots and runs completely from CD." (Source: www.knoppix.net [knoppix.net]).

      So it is kind of hard for a Knoppix installation to become corrupt; worst case scenario is you just burn new copy of the Knoppix CD. :-) The parent comment is in fact funny (and quite so!), rather than insightful as it's currently moderated. ;-)

      • Re:Yes, but.... (Score:5, Informative)

        by the_shaitan ( 596754 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:53AM (#10543240)
        Umm... Knoppix can be installed on to the hard disk and many people actually do so because then they get a Debian-like OS on their hard-disk.

        Knoppix itself ships with a hard-disk install script. See this page for more info - http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/HdInstallHow To

        Regards,
        The Shaitan

        • Re:Yes, but.... (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I have four Knoppix hard drive installs around the house. Love it and have set it up for a half dozen former Windows uers.
          But although I do love Knoppix, DSL has come a long way with its on-line install program that lets you basically customize your distro from almost scratch. Why Knoppix still refuses to pack the Nano editor still escapes me. Emacs is way too overweight for little setup script editing on the command line.
          Just this weekend I replaced a dying notebook system that was dual booting SUS

        • knoppix HDIsntall sucks (Score:3, Informative)

          by mekkab ( 133181 )
          You USED to be able to install knoppix to a HD...

          however if you read the FAQ on the new version of knoppix, they explicitly state

          Q: Can one also install the distribution from the CD onto a hard drive?

          A: In principal, yes (after all, the "master" system also runs on a hard
          drive before it is burned to CD). However there is currently no
          installation GUI for this, so installation to a hard drive should probably
          only be attempted by more knowledgeable Linux users.

          ...

          .) Reboot, try the system out, fix any b

          • Re:knoppix HDIsntall sucks (Score:3, Informative)

            by emj ( 15659 )
            It works perfectly, I'm writing this on a laptop where Knoppix was installed. It autodetected everything and installed faster tahn any distro I have ever seen.

            With a good GUI as well, letting me choose alot of diffrent options.
    • Check out official [knoppix.net] forums [knoppix.net] for confirmation. ISO available here [hs-harz.de], why not use the Coral Cache [nyud.net] and save a /.ing? It has nifty new firewalling in addition to all the usual updates. This version was released from the German PC-Welt magazine and is in German only, but using lang=whatever at boot time will cure that. It will obviously differ from the 'official' 3.7 CD which should come out soon, but not by much - so worth a CD-RW for the curious I suppose. md5sums are spewed around the net, no point me quoting one

  • So weird... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheApocalypse ( 759538 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:03AM (#10543125) Homepage
    Just two days ago I just had to use Knoppix to recover my system after a failed attempt to upgrade the kernel. Very good to have as a recovery tool.

    • Re:So weird... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by TheApocalypse ( 759538 )
      I'm still kind of a Linux newbie. I knew that I would mess up with installing the kernel, but it gives me the experience to learn from my mistakes.

      • Pretty much the same here. I asked for RedHat (it was 2002) to be installed when I purchased the new machine but, oops, Linux has to be installed before Windows. Vendor screwup.

        I've played around with the Knoppix CD but don't quite know what to do with Linux yet, it seems complicated.

        I guess I've been dumbified from too much Windows usage and it'd be great to get Linux working, but I feel it would be too time-consuming.

    • Re:So weird... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:24AM (#10543179)
      Does not compute. Why didn't you copy your new kernel as a different name in your /boot directory and add a new lilo.conf entry (if you are using lilo) and then run lilo? Even if you can't boot, most Linux installation cds allow command line boot parameters something like
      :boot /dev/hda2 linuxtest (linuxtest being /boot/linuxtest)
      On a side note, Linux install cds or apps like Knoppix are excellent tools if you are forced to administer a Windows server. It should be no suprise that a boot with the ntfs driver is vastly superior to the Windows Recovery Console. But suprisingly, the ntfs driver is robust enough that it can access hard drives that Windows will spit out saying a hardware error has occurred. Saved my ass twice already.

      • Re:So weird... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by typobox43 ( 677545 ) <typobox43@gmail.com> on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:58AM (#10543253) Homepage
        But suprisingly, the ntfs driver is robust enough that it can access hard drives that Windows will spit out saying a hardware error has occurred. Saved my ass twice already. Amen to that. It's the only reason I have any data left off of a hard drive that failed a few months ago. While the data was copied at a disgustingly slow pace to my USB flash drive, it was preserved, even when Windows refused to even boot off of the drive.

      • Re:So weird... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Random BedHead Ed ( 602081 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @10:38AM (#10544496) Homepage Journal

        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 [google.com] that renders Longhorn's WinFS obsolete ... two years before the release of Longhorn. Is Bill asleep at the wheel?

    • Yeah, I heard about Knoppix about a month ago and decided to download it. I'll let you know if it's any good once I've got it all down over my 56k.

      • Re:So weird... (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's been out for a couple of years, but hey, we'll all wait for your review.

  • New Kid on the block? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:04AM (#10543127)
    Knoppix, the hot new kid on the block

    New? Wow, I'm glad I don't live in that neighborhood.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:So you can fix Linux.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by rixdaffy ( 138224 ) * on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:11AM (#10543143) Homepage

      I think NTFS is probably read-only so you can't fix it directly. But in case you weren't smart enough to keep backups around, you can use Knoppix to backup your files over the network. I did the same thing for a friend who couldn't boot up her XP installation anymore after Norton Antivirus "cleaned" a bit too much (even safe mode didn't work). But I ended up copying the data to an external firewire disk 'cause the network (which Knoppix didn't have any problems to detect) was too slow.

      Go Linux/Knoppix!

      Ricardo.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I was able to get windows booting in safe mode up till a point though (which confused me if it was hardware related) and then it would freeze.

          I've seen this a few times. It seems as though the boot process uses a different method of accessing the disk, but when Windows loads the real IDE/SCSI driver, the machine freezes.

          This actually means that your entire drive is not dead, and recovery through Knoppix indeed could be a possibility. Maybe read-only, but then again, you don't wanna go changing those tax

      • Re:So you can fix Linux.... (Score:4, Informative)

        by kazoosandinstruments ( 717278 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:33AM (#10543203)
        captive-ntfs 1.14 works just fine for me w/Knoppix 3.4 (though 1.15 w/Knoppix 3.6 failed to mount my NTFS partitions, that is another story altogether) ... so, you can actually read/write to NTFS from Knoppix if you manually configure captive and mount the NTFS partition(s) yourself.

        • Re:So you can fix Linux.... (Score:5, Informative)

          by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @07:04AM (#10543644)
          captive-ntfs needs a captive user and group to work properly. Manually adding them allows it to work correctly again on 3.6. I even made a personal remaster of Knoppix with fix and the XP drivers captive-install-acquire already done. That last is handy because I have had NICS that XP didn't recognize and it gets the driver install files on the disk.
          • Where can I get a copy of that remaster? That's one of the most useful things about Knoppix, after all.
            • You have to make it yourself. That remaster has files that are copyright MS on it. You'll need a fairly beefy machine to do it in less than geological time. A machine that is at least 1GHz and 512MB(+ 1GB swap) of memory gets tolerable. I use a 2.4Ghz PIV with a GB of RAM. That will spit an iso out in about 7 minutes. You will also need at least 3GB of disk space to hold the uncompressed distro and the iso you will make from it. Follow the instructions here [knoppix.net].

              Knoppix IS Debian so you'll need some Debian

      • You mean linux NTFS support... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by msimm ( 580077 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @03:24AM (#10543301) Homepage
        Last I heard write was still experiencing random failures, not that it matters for data recovery.

        But I'd recommend using this [windowsubcd.com] to work on/repair Windows computers. You get read/write (its really just Windows, so..) and a lot of crap can be repaired with a virus/adware scan (or two). If your comfortable enough with Windows there really isn't much you can't recover from once you can read the disk (sort of a complete hardware failure).

        As a side note, it also reads ext2 and 3. Handy for working on your friends dual-boot systems too.

        Personally, I carry on of these and either Knoppix or an older Gentoo live disk.
    • This is what you do: You use Knoppix to boot the box and dd the filesystem onto a network drive somewhere (nfs/smb, doesn't matter). Then you work on the backup image as a loop mount. You never, never do anything on the corrupt disk, ever. This is why: If you screw up, you don't have anything to fall back to. You can't screw up a loop mount or a backup.

      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.

    • Insert linux [inside-security.de] is a knoppix based recovery linux that has read/write access to ntfs partitions. Very handy and has some nice recovery tools. It still needs a few more things but they are working on it from what I read.

  • What I like... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zoloto ( 586738 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:06AM (#10543134)
    Is that IBM has done this, right off their own website and helping the system admins, techies and anyone else interested in learning how to fix your defunct or otherwise broken system.

    • Re:What I like... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Is that IBM has done this, right off their own website and helping the system admins, techies and anyone else interested in learning how to fix your defunct or otherwise broken system

      Google for some more articles by the same author. There are gems there.

  • Oldie but a goodie (Score:5, Informative)

    by ozmanjusri ( 601766 ) <aussie_bob@ho[ ]il.com ['tma' in gap]> on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:07AM (#10543138) Journal
    This one's been around for a while. It's a useful resource, but some of the more specialised distros are easier to use for rescue disks.
    http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php [frozentech.com] has a good list of them.

  • "Really? I had no Idea!!!" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zzootnik ( 179922 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:08AM (#10543139)
    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?

  • There are many other alternatives (Score:5, Informative)

    by auzy ( 680819 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:09AM (#10543142)
    You can also use the gentoo live CD (you can even get an experimental one for reiser4) at www.gentoo.org.

    There are also lots of speecialised ones. generally, the only time a linux box wont boot though is just a lilo or grub problem...

    By the way, the coralised link is: http://www-106.ibm.com.nyud.net:8090/developerwork s/linux/library/l-knopx.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01-obg-Sys Recover
    • ...and the HTMLised coralised link is: this. [nyud.net]

    • By the way, the coralised link is: http://www-106.ibm.com.nyud.net:8090/developerwork s/linux/library/l-knopx.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01-obg-Sys Recover

      Does IBM really require a Coral link?
      I don't think I've ever seen them get Slashdotted.

    • Um??? The gentoo live CD is just to install gentoo. All it contains are portage files and source tarballs for installing software. There is even the minimal CD that only contains a working kernel and the least amount required to start the installation.

      They called it a live CD, I guess, because you can boot into a console unlike some other distro's installations. But I don't think they intended for it to be used as a recovery for systems other than gentoo.

      I've only used it as a recovery once when I com

  • Just used Knoppix... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dbCooper0 ( 398528 ) <[ten.notirt] [ta] [cbd]> on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:20AM (#10543171) Journal
    ...with Samba to copy shit off a dead-in-the-water winderz 98 box. Pest Patrol had found 3,212 nasties on the box in question. I retrieved enough data to not worry about a crash on a re-install of winderz 98. I'm thinkin' of puttin' them up to win2k, but WTF, they're not payin' that much. (they have an XP License, FWIW)

    Tbe Knoppix Distro has been helpful at this point - and I'm glad that I kept it around, because I needed to get these people's email transferred without much hassle

    • re-install of winderz 98. I'm thinkin' of puttin' them up to win2k, but WTF, they're not payin' that much. (they have an XP License, FWIW)

      You sound like you are sysadmining these people. You should be fired. Windows 98 is no longer supported by Microsoft. It is not strange that Pest Patrol found xK "nasties" there. And they nasties will come back quite quickly unless they get Windows 2000, Windows XP SP2, with adequate virus software.

      Then you wouldn't have to sysadmin them so much! Oh wait, you get pa

  • Toolbox (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:21AM (#10543174) Homepage Journal
    In my bag, I always carry:
    1. Knoppix
    2. Windows Usual Stuff
      • MS service packs
      • Antivirus / Ad-aware
      • Putty, Ghostscript
      • Cygwin installer and scripts
    3. Solaris patches / packages / scripts
    4. 64MB compact flash card / USB reader
      (Mini Usual Stuff)
      • MS monthly patch of the week
      • Antivirus / Ad-aware
      • Putty
    5. Leatherman and mini-nutdriver set

      1. It's been a long time since I've needed anything else. I used to carry a Trinux CD, but now it's Knoppix.

        I use the compact flash card because it fits in both my camera and my PDA.

    • One thing your missing.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by msimm ( 580077 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @03:10AM (#10543278) Homepage
      As a computer networking student I'm absolutely AMAZED this hasn't gotten more attention then it has.

      Under your MS stuff (I know, I know, but in industry it really is a necessary evil) you should definitely have a Windows Boot CD [windowsubcd.com]. And I don't mean a DOS floppy! Its basically a live, say Windows XP disk with preinstalled software (virus scan, adware removers, registry editors, complete networking setup). It really has all the tools you commonly use when fixing the obligatory windows box and probably a few you've never even known you'd need.

      I highly recommend you build one, and if the directions sound a little complicated, just take your time and reread them, there's about 3 step and none of the are actually complicated.

      The worst thing you can do is boot a infected PC from an infected hard drive, not to mention the trouble accessing NTFS with FULL read-write.

      • I don't do that. I don't use Windows servers. If a Windows client breaks to the extent that it needs a bootable CD to fix, I wipe it. Users know this drill.

        But still and all, it's a good idea to have set aside just in case someone's life just will *end* if they can't get that Powerpoint file out of My Documents.
        • Thats what we're paid for. Sometimes small miricles.

          With a vanilla client ghosting would probably be quicker anyway.

        • Re:One thing your missing.. (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          If a Windows client breaks to the extent that it needs a bootable CD to fix, I wipe it. Users know this drill.

          I bet that keeps them from actaully bothering you with problems, since it seems at the drop of a hat you'll erase their hard drive on them. Good on you, mate!

      • The Windows Boot CD is based on Bart Lagerweij's PE Builder. Go to the BartPE website [nu2.nu] to learn how to brew your own customized Windows Boot CD.

        There are scads of folks out there busily building their own add-ons and plugins [nu2.nu] for the BartPE environment which you can just download and include in your own installation- everything from Java Runtime [jibble.org] to Citrix ICA client [on.net] to Trillian [comcast.net]. And literally a hundred more.

        I've found it an indispensible Windows recovery tool. I can boot off the CD and run Adaware, Sp

    • That's a good kit, but what, no Tom's Root/Boot disk? It's the most GNU/Linux you can put on 1 floppy disk! [toms.net] I swear, this little sucker has saved my bacon so many times, and I learned a lot about Linux by using it. You wanna talk about good foo? It's got a freaking 67k version of emacs on it! This disk is stripped down to the wires and yet still kick-ass functional.

      Go, Tom!

      Cheers,
      Richard

      P.S. I love the Leatherman tool, too, but ever since 9/11 I have lost more of them than I would like to cou

  • MEPIS rocks for this too... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) * on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:23AM (#10543178)
    Yes, I'm distro whoring here. Personally, I'd recommend MEPIS [mepis.org] over Knoppix. Knoppix is fine as a boot disk, but MEPIS is by far the easiest-to-use distro and most overall enjoyable to work with that I know of. MEPIS started as a bootable CD, but it's grown into a full-fledged Debian-based distribution now, and I'd say a good 80%-90% of MEPIS users now use it as their primary distribution, not just a rescue disk or "Linux test" distro.


    No, I'm not a weenie who needs things spoon fed to them, I've been using Linux since long before it was cool or chic, starting with Slack back in '96, then RedHat, then Mandrake. After Win2k came out I moved back to using Windows for most of my day-to-day desktop needs (now mostly Win XP), but recently I've installed MEPIS on my laptop and I find it quite enjoyable to use. The things that stand out to me are 1) fabulous hardware compatibility, including out of the box support for almost every component of my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop, with NVidia GeForce4 Go graphics and so on (I did have to make a quick manual edit to XF86Config-4 to get widescreen support, and my Microsoft MN-720 802.11b card took about half an hour of screwing around to get running, but ndiswrapper was already there, I just had to find the right driver version and run it.


    Okay, that's all the ranting I can do for now. Did I mention that MEPIS makes a great recovery CD? That's how I first discovered it. Give it a try, funny name aside.

  • news? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pe1chl ( 90186 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:30AM (#10543195)
    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)

  • "manage [...] filesystems" - or plain ranting (Score:3, Insightful)

    by l3v1 ( 787564 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:41AM (#10543219)
    I don't say K/Gnoppix is no good, because it's just great, imho the best live linux version for jumpstarting linux illiterates (other people check this [livebsd.com]. And I don't argue you can do lots of things with it. But for accessing and managing filesystems in general... well, access my xfs partitions with a knoppix please. or better not, keep away :)

    If one wants to have rescue stuff ready, ones prepares good rescue stuff. E.g. an usb drive with a mini distro with >2 kernel versions helluvalot compiled modules, all possible filesystem support, disk fscking tools (for all supported filesystems) and you don't relly need much more.

    A general purpose 2.4.x-based live distro for the masses jsut doesn't always qualify for such uses.

    You know the drill, use the right tool for the job.

  • I just used Damn Small Linux to overhual a Susebox (Score:5, Informative)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @02:53AM (#10543241)
    A friend brought me his machine to upgrade.
    A Frys cheapo Linux special, originally it came with a 30g, 128m ram and Thiz Linux. I Thized the disc straight into the trash and installed Suse 9.0 on it for him when he first got it.

    Well, as time went on he realized that his system needed upgrading. So I sent him to the store and he brought back another 128m ram, a 120g drive and Suse 9.1 Pro.

    The plan was to have the old doggy 30g as his boot/OS/work drive (hda) and his new 120g as /home (hdb)....

    Well, booting up 9.1 does not come up and say
    "Hey, I see you have data on your drive already and a new blank drive. Would you like to move it around in anyway before we procede?"

    No, Suse just suggests that you wipe everything out and start over. Even if you tell it you want to do an upgrade, it has NO PROVISION what-so-ever to allow you to format the new drive then move your old /home from hda to hdb then reformat hda and partition it up in a useful way.

    Ok, so in light of this, I took Damn Small Linux 0.8.2 [damnsmalllinux.org]
    and booted up. Opened a root terminal, fdisked hdb, formated it for ext3 then moved all of his old /home data from hda to hdb.

    It copied EVERYTHING. Hidden files, configurations, email, cookies, bookmarks, music, photos, the whole works.

    When it was done I booted into Suse 9.1 pro, did a NEW INSTALLATION and wiped hda clean, installed the OS on it and told it that /home is on hdb1.

    I created the same user and password as the old system so Suse looked at the /home on the new 120g drive and asked me if I wanted to change the permissions and ownership over. I said yes.

    The install proceded normally to completion.
    When it was finished and I rebooted the system, it was identical to the way it was brought to me except that he now has a 120g /home directory instead of the 10gigs he had before.

    Damn Small Linux is the very best tool a tech can carry with him. I keep a copies on biz cards in all of my tool boxes and in each of my vehicles.
    I don't leave home without it.

    I also carry standard Knoppix in case I run into a case where I need k3b on the ailing machine.
    I have several other versions of Knoppix I keep handy for various network jobs, like knoppix-std [knoppix-std.org]
    and a few other network related Knoppix knock offs..
    • Of course you could have done this with SuSE as well, but you should not have tried two things (upgrade and drive reassignment) in one go.
      You could have upgraded from 9.0 to 9.1 first and then add the new drive and move /home to it, or first add the new drive and move /home, then re-install from scratch on the old drive.
      • Well, the whole point of the exercise was to install 9.1 on the 30g and use the entire 30g for the OS. The way I did it allowed me to wipe the old drive totally out and start over with it fresh and 100% dedicated to the OS and nothing else.

        hda is strictly for the OS and hdb is strictly for /home.. I saw no other way to accomplish this task in as few steps as this method took.

        The other thing that was nice about using DSL, I just had to mount the partitions, they were already full R/W without playing the

        • Re:I just used Damn Small Linux to overhual a Suse (Score:5, Informative)

          by pe1chl ( 90186 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @04:00AM (#10543377)
          I think you could have added the new disk to the old running system, fdisk and format it using yast or commandline tools, move your home there, and then re-install the system on the 30GB disk.
          I would have done:
          - login as root
          - cd /
          - mv home home.orig
          - mkdir home
          - yast
          (add the disk, say it will be /home, format it)
          - df
          (make sure the /dev/sdb1 is now mounted as /home)
          - mv /home.orig/* /home
          - rmdir /home.orig

          home is now on the new disk.
          reboot system from CD, install 9.1 on 30GB and during partition selection tell it that /home is /dev/sdb1.
          that should do it.
    • Damn Small Linux is the very best tool a tech can carry with him.

      My swiss army knife beats your damn small linux any day of the week :-)

    • No, Suse just suggests that you wipe everything out and start over. Even if you tell it you want to do an upgrade, it has NO PROVISION what-so-ever to allow you to format the new drive then move your old /home from hda to hdb then reformat hda and partition it up in a useful way.

      Handy feature about the SuSE installation stuff - while it comes up with a nice, graphical interface, virtual console Alt-F(something) has a full bash prompt with lots of useful utilities.

      It's possible to bring up network connect

  • But what about winmodem support? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ziviyr ( 95582 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @03:13AM (#10543281) Homepage
    I'm dying to figure this part out...
    • That article is over a year old things have changed significantly:
      • article claims all knoppix is german by default. No, there are two flavours of images you can download -EN (English) and -DE (deutsch umm that's german in german to non german speakers :-) ).iso
      • talks about 3.2 (understandably). 3.6 is out, and it includes kernel 2.6.7, (you have to invoke knoppix26 on the command line) which is pretty close to the latest and greatest.
      • in 3.6, there are softmodem drivers. Some of them are truly free, oth

  • Why is this news (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The article is dated October 23, 2003. Nearly a year old!

    There must be newer versions of almost everything mentioned in the article, and probably better ways of doing most of the tasks...

    And most /. readers know about Knoppix already.
    • Not only is this old, but it was old news back when I first started using computers with hard disks... the only difference is the mechanism you use to get a kernel booted from another device.

  • First rate device detection (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16, 2004 @04:00AM (#10543378)
    Luckily I haven't had to use Knoppix to recover any crashed systems...

    However I did use it to tweak the device settings on my install of FreeBSD. Knoppix has always detected anything I threw at it, while FreeBSD isn't quite up to the same level (but getting better). So, I gave Knoppix a whirl and got enough driver info for the noname videocard that shipped in the used computer I was setting up as a server.

    Rock on Knoppix!

  • ntfsclone (Score:2, Interesting)

    by phrasebook ( 740834 )
    Where is ntfsclone in the latest KNOPPIX? I tried version 3.4 I think it was - couldn't find it anywhere, so had to revert to 3.3. There was an ntfsprogs package but it didn't seem to include all the tools. That's all I use KNOPPIX for - making an image of my Win2K partition.

  • Tom's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grolschie ( 610666 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @04:12AM (#10543397)
    Tom's Root Boot" [toms.net] is the only Linux boot CD needed to fix a Linux system. Although I use Knoppix occasionally to test hardware.

  • Real world application (Score:3, Funny)

    by dilvish_the_damned ( 167205 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @05:06AM (#10543483) Journal
    I had a fault on my home system, so I tried to knoppix my wife around. I did not recover from the attempt no matter what utilities I tried. I tried to reiser, I tried to fsck her. I even tried mem86 check her and remind her of all the good times we had. In the end, she rebooted me no matter how many times I tried to replug her.
    Knoppix not good for everything.
    Yep, this is bad. Baaaddd joke if you can call it that.
    Oh, by the way, this is nothing but flaimbait.
    Burn karma, burn.

  • Also... (Score:3, Informative)

    by RWerp ( 798951 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @05:13AM (#10543496)
    http://rescuecd.pld-linux.org/ [pld-linux.org]

  • Better safe than sorry (Score:5, Informative)

    by Deorus ( 811828 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @06:05AM (#10543571)

    First of all, there are a couple of basic steps people can take to ensure their systems are rescuable and secure regardless of any patches they have applied.

    • Make sure your root filesystem is as small as possible to minimize the chances of corruption there and that you can have it mounted read-only. This not only improves your security (since you can simply remove CAP_SYS_ADMIN from all your daemons and they won't be able to remount anything), but also makes it even harder to corrupt the root filesystem. Your user and group information files will need to be moved to /var and appropriate symbolic links created in /etc so that users can still change user and group passwords and you can create accounts without remounting the root filesystem read-write.
    • Never remove your legacy device inames from /dev, ever! Even if you use devfs or udev, a new /dev is mounted over the original one, so the legacy inames disappear magically from VFS. The legacy device inames may come in handy in a system recovery later. If you use devfs or udev, make sure your /dev filesystem is mounted with the noexec option enabled for security reasons.
    • Make sure your /var is always mounted noexec and nodev. If you use qmail, switch to Postfix (yes, I've done it, DJB is such a dumbass with his lack of respect for standard directory hierarchies).
    • Make sure your /tmp is not in your root filesystem. You can mount a tmpfs for your /tmp and point /usr/tmp, /var/tmp, and /anything-else/.../tmp to your /tmp with a symbolic link. If you do mount a tmpfs or any other kind of filesystem, make sure you do it with the noexec and nodev options enabled. If you can't or are not willing to use another filesystem for /tmp (tmpfs sometimes is too small for CVS, and you may not have enough space for a dedicated /tmp), use /var/tmp instead (assuming you've mounted /var according to my instructions above).
    • Grab a copy of the GNU fileutils from a mirror close to you, compile it statically, and install the resulting binaries in /sbin (not /bin). If anytime later something terrible happens to your libc, you can always make /sbin have precedence over /bin in your $PATH and use the static binaries in /sbin instead for recovery. Always remember to make add /sbin first in your $PATH if you ever upgrade your libc from the sources, especially if it is your first time doing so (believe me, everyone I know, including me, had problems with their first libc installations from the source). Doing this can save you from a lot of trouble.
    • Even when you know your kernel binary will boot perfectly (because perhaps you used the same configuration file to compile the same kervnel version), make a backup of your old kernel by renaming (not copying) it and specifying the new name in lilo.conf. LILO knows nothing about filesystems (never used grub, so I can't talk about it, but I suspect the same thing happens with it), so if your kernel, for some reason, gets fragmented in your filesystem, you will be in trouble to boot from it, since LILO assumes the kernel is never fragmented.

    Following above steps is usually enough to prevent rescue situations because the root filesystem is vital, so protecting it is the first line of defense, but if the worse comes to worst and you ever get into trouble, you must learn with the problem. If the kernel loads and init doesn't, it may be a libc problem. Try booting with init=/bin/sh, remount your filesystems read-write, examine the problem, umount them (or remount them read-write, when unmount is not possible), sync, reboot and watch the changes. If the kernel does not load, you may need a

  • Yawn - where is the innovation? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wow - Solaris has been doing this for years - SunOS even used to do it off tape.

    Ever hear of "boot [cdrom|net|root-mirror] -s"? Come up in single user off alternate media, mount your root disk and proceed to fix as necessary.

    Even DOS was able to do this - it was called a boot floppy.

    Just because something puts a new wrapper on the process and because its based of Linux doesnt make it incredible.

  • Knoppix Hacks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by StoneTable ( 145114 ) <stone.stonetable@org> on Saturday October 16, 2004 @07:57AM (#10543778) Homepage
    Knoppix can do that and a whole lot more.

    Knoppix Hacks [oreilly.com]

    Virus scanning, emergency router, write to NTFS, even fire up a mythtv box.

  • slashdotted? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Krunch ( 704330 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @08:51AM (#10543978) Homepage
    Our apologies...
    The IBM developerWorks Web site is currently under maintenance.
    Please try again later.

    Thank you.
    Here [google.com] is the Google cached version.

  • We /.'d IBM? (Score:3, Funny)

    by HangingChad ( 677530 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @10:09AM (#10544357) Homepage
    That server is offline this am.

    Hey, IBM, that was only a demonstration of our power.

  • IBM slashdotted? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Saturday October 16, 2004 @10:32AM (#10544470) Homepage Journal

    Our apologies...

    The IBM developerWorks Web site is currently under maintenance.
    Please try again later.

    Thank you.

    Wow... We slashdotted IBM! But to the point: I wonder what is your experience. What is better for system recovery? Standard Knoppix [knoppix.org] which is a general purpose desktop system meant to be an impressive demonstration tool but lacking many security programs, or some specialised versions like Knoppix STD [knoppix-std.org] or Local Area Security [localareasecurity.com] which have more tools but are kind of "script kiddie friendly" and look very unprofessional with their Martix themes, leet-speak, "proving no localhost is safe" slogans etc. making them look more like intrusion than recovery tools? Or maybe Morphix [morphix.org] is the answer thanks to its ease of customisation and apt-getting new packages on the fly? Do you have any Real World(TM) experience?

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