True Stories of Knoppix Rescues

I had a debian install, on a resier partition. There were two drives in that machine a primary 8 gig for the system, and a second 80 gig drive for data. I had left the machine running while I was away on vacation. It figures the machine that always had ghosts in the Motherboard, and Ram finally decides it kick the bucket while I am gone.

Okay I can boot the system but it only runs for 1 minute at a time, barely log enough to log in. under knoppix it does the same thing. Barely getting the whole GUI loaded. But Knoppix set to run level 3 a quick mount -rw /hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 and then a cp my home directory to /hdb1 and I have a backup of my user files. Fortunately the system ran during that copy progress, and crashed 30 seconds after it ended.

I pulled the Hard drive and it sat on a shelf for 3 months while I figured out what I wanted for my next computer. When my new 12" Powerbook came in, I opened up my windows gaming rig, put the hard drive in side, and loaded up knoppix. a quick samba share later, and 30 minutes of copying I had a complete back up of the orginial resier drive and my files. Reboot the machine into windows, and partition and format the drive for the worst of all file systems Fat32, and the 80 gig drive is going into a firewire enclosure over the weekend.

Now if they only had a good cross platform File System.

I used knoppix a couple of times:

1. I was restting the root pw and messed it up (that's embarrassing, and quite surprising when realized), and

2. Something was screwy with my filesystems and I couldn't upgrade to the 2.6 kernel, so I ended up copying everthing to a new drive and creating a new filesystem, then copying everything back.

Kanotix is better at hardware detection Knoppix won't load on my toshiba laptop ok maybe there was a flag there i forgot to add but i did try a few ...

Slax also worked ok on my laptop.