System Recovery with Knoppix

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."

The best tool :)

[hunte]

I'm a very happy Knoppix user, IMHO is the final swiss knife!

Here a small list of very powerful features:

- NTFS (safe read only) support + all FS support
- the linux fdisk
- qtparted for working with partitions (like Partition Magic, but GPL)
- partimage (like Norton Ghost, but GPL)
- the cool LinNeighborhood (for easy windows/samba usage)
- diagnose all hardware with the knoppix auto-detect kernel
- all the best network diagnosis tools (nmap, nessus, tcpdump, ethereal, etc)
- vim
- kde
- easy support of external usb2/firewire external drives
- 1174 packages on a single autoboot CD

(is present a DVD version too on ftp!!!!!)

A nice link -> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/ [shockfamily.net]

Re:Why don't you

[pulu]

You might think about This CD [nu2.nu] for windows.... I used Knoppix all the time, but the lack of good NTFS support in linux constantly gets me down. This guy is XP/2003 based, and does pretty much the same thing. You can virus scan too, which windows loves.

Knoppix saved me twice

[Experiment 626]

Over the past few weeks Knoppix has gotten me out of a couple tough spots.

First, I was setting up RedHat on my laptop. Unfortunately, RH9 came with no drivers for my ethernet or wifi. No problem, I'll just go online and... Uh oh, Catch-22, I can't download network drivers till I get online. Fortunately, Knoppix recognized the ethernet card and got me up and running, I downloaded to the hard drive, rebooted to RedHat, and set it up.

True, I could have also solved that using sneakernet / USB drive / whatever, but the next time Knoppix helped me it was more indispensable. I was adjusting my LILO settings and came up with a conf file that ran just fine in lilo, but caused a kernel panic every time I booted with it. No rescue disc either, being a floppyless computer. I booted Knoppix, fixed the lilo.conf, mounted my /boot partition, and made a working bootloader.

Anyway, Knoppix is good to have around. When something is messed up, it will get you up and running, see all your files, and see most of the hardware out there too. Plus of course the obvious Linux evangilism uses.