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."

Knoppix is great

[forsetti]

Many people in my Windows-based office walk past my Gentoo desktop, wondering what I'm running. When they see how well it works (no viruses, no reboots, lots of tools available), they want to know how hard it is to install. Of course, Gentoo is not for the beginner. But, I've been handing out Knoppix CDs left and right. People love it!

Rescuing data from a broken machine

[RGRistroph]

Knoppix is very useful for getting your data out of a broken computer, prior to re-installing or replacing the harddrive outright.

I made a floppy based linux especially for this purpose: http://rgr.freeshell.org/flinux/escape/ [freeshell.org]. However, if you have a network, it is probably easier to use Knoppix to copy the data over the network rather than burn it to a cd. Note that Knoppix does have cdrecord and mkisofs on it; if you can boot knoppix from one cd drive, and have another to access as a burner (say an external USB cd burner) then you can save your data that way. Knoppix is better than my floppy setup, unless you have no network, and only a cd burner and no other CD device to boot from. Knoppix also supports more filesystems and hardware than I can fit on a floppy or care to deal with.

Timo's Rescue CD is another good one

[Loualbano2]

Another good live boot cd is Timo's rescue cd:

http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net/

It's got a lot of drivers (as modules), ext2 (which should work on ext3) undelete utilities, and all the daemon and client utils you could want. It's great for non-booting laptops that need to have data dumped off of them so you can reload the OS (something that happens a lot).

One thing it doesn't do is autodetect everything like Knoppix does, and it doesn't have X, but it does fit on a minicd where Knoppix does not.

-ft

Knoppix vs. Morphix

[jbolden]

Rather than the "Knoppix" is great which everyone agrees with I was wondering if any Morphix users out there can contrast the two.