Knoppix-tools
From MissionTechWiki
Using Knoppix as a support tool
Because Knoppix is a live-boot CD that does a good job of auto-detecting your computer's hardware and provides an operating system independent of your hard drive contents, it is a useful support tool in many situations.
Booting into memtest and running the memory test gives you reasonable confidence that your CPU and memory and motherboard and text display are functioning error-free.
Booting into Knoppix allows you to
- check that most of your hardware is operating correctly. (Just check that it is recognised and that it seems to be fully functional.)
- recover data from a FAT or NTFS partition even if Windows won't start in safe mode. (This can also be useful to recover data from a secondary disk drive which was removed from a Windows system sometime earlier.)
- connect to other computers across your ethernet LAN (and maybe your wireless LAN) to copy large amounts of data to another machine on the network for data recovery from dead Windows machines.
- modify or backup a hard drive's partitions on the fly using qtparted or gparted (but I tend to prefer to use the gparted or clonezilla live-boot CDs for this - see below).
- Of course, Knoppix can be great for recovering data from a dead Linux installation too. ;-)
- Knoppix can also claim a DHCP identity on your LAN and you can then run a network sniffer (such as ethereal/wireshark) or a network traffic monitor (such as ntop) or network testing tools (such as nmap, ping, host, traceroute etc.)
- Once your knoppix machine is on the LAN or Internet you can use it to view other machines using vnc.
Other live CDs
Using other similar, more specialised live-boot CDs allow you focus more conveniently on specialised tasks.
- The GParted live CD is a very powerful free alternative to Partition Magic (or similar) allowing you to modify your hard drive's partitions on the fly.
- The Clonezilla live CD (use the live link at Clonezilla download) is a very powerful system imaging solution (providing capabilities like Norton Ghost).
RW Access to NTFS under Linux
RW Access to NTFS: Just a note about using Knoppix to gain write access to ntfs partitions (or almost any current Linux). The older ntfs drivers (many still around) are only safe for reading ntfs partitions. There is a new driver that allows you to safely write files on ntfs partitions - the so-called ntfs-3g (third-generation) driver. What follows is a brief explanation of how to use ntfs-3g. (Full disclosure: While a stable release version is now available, the current Knoppix CD (v5.1) uses a slightly older but very reliable beta release.)
In Linux, a filesystem is first mounted 'on top of' an existing directory, typically a location called something like /media/mydrive. Then the filesystem is accessible. When you are loan modification finished accessing the filesystem, you unmount it, to flush any data still in buffers and prevent further read/write access attempts. Note that mounting and unmounting filesystems is a privileged action, and you normally need to use root privileges to run the commands.
To mount an ntfs filesystem for read/write access:
Boot the Knoppix liveCD and run the Konsole terminal program.
(The bold material in what follows is the Knoppix command prompt.)
Run su to get a superuser prompt.
knoppix@Knoppix: ~$ su
Create a directory where you can mount the filesystem.
root@Knoppix: /ramdisk/home/knoppix # mkdir /media/mydrive
Check what hard disk drives Knoppix has detected on your system.
root@Knoppix: /ramdisk/home/knoppix # ls /dev/hd* /dev/sd*
Mount the filesystem with a command like:
root@Knoppix: /ramdisk/home/knoppix # mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /media/mydrive -o rw
Explanation:
use the mount command
set the filesystem type to be NTFS - 3rd Generation with -t ntfs-3g
use the first (primary) partition on the first IDE drive: /dev/hda1
(If you have a SATA or SCSI drive use /dev/sda1 instead.)
make the data accessible in the directory /media/mydrive
use the readable-and-writable option -o rw,
so you can write data to the mounted filesystem.
As a sanity check, look at the files that you can now see at the mount point - it should show the files in the root directory of your selected ntfs partition.
root@Knoppix: /ramdisk/home/knoppix # ls /media/mydrive
Now you can read from and write to the files in the directory tree under /media/mydrive. You can use standard shell commands from the console terminal or a single click on the appropriate drive icon on the desktop for a gui file-manager where you can drag and drop files to or from the ntfs filesystem. (In some situations you may need to know how to manage file-ownership within Windows later.)
When you are finished working with the data, unmount the filesystem. (Don't just power off.)
root@Knoppix: /ramdisk/home/knoppix # umount /media/mydrive
Now you can shut down Knoppix (by selecting Log out from the K-menu at the bottom left of the desktop.) If no other filesystems are mounted, it is safe to just turn off the power, but shutting down will conveniently eject the Knoppix CD for you.
This of course is just the start.