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Knoppix Linux Gripes Knoppix is the classic Live CD distribution of Linux

Rescuing Windows

Using: Knoppix Live CD version 3.9 running kernel version 2.6.11.

March 6, 2006. Knoppix is popular for rescuing files from a Windows machine that no longer boots. Boot the machine from the Knoppix CD - it can read all Windows file systems - and use Knoppix to copy files off the problematic machine. The first time I had to do this for real, there were some annoyances along the way. 

The computer in question didn't have a floppy disk drive. I connected an external floppy disk drive to a USB port. Knoppix would neither read nor write the floppy disk. 

Then I connected a thumb drive to a USB port. Knoppix read the thumb drive but wouldn't write to it. The file system on the thumb drive was FAT32. 

Then I connected the machine to my LAN. The basic TCP/IP networking was fine. It could see shared folders on the network. It could read shared folders on the network. But, of course, I needed to write to the shared folders. That it wouldn't do (despite providing the appropriate Windows file sharing userid/password). 

Being a nerd I know that Samba is the Unix/Linux software that does Windows file sharing, so I started the Samba server. I told it to share the entire partition and provided a password. It took a while (watched pot and boiling and all that), but eventually another machine on the LAN saw the Knoppix machine and its "shares".  

However, Knoppix only uses a workgroup name of "workgroup". When the Samba server was started there was no way to specify a workgroup name.  

When I finally tried to connect to the Knoppix machine from a Windows machine on the LAN, I was prompted for a userid and password. Say what??? When the Samba server started, it asked for a password which I dutifully entered twice. Nothing about a userid. So typical. I guessed that the userid was the same as the machine name which was "Knoppix". Lucky guess.

Update: March 25, 2006. FYI: A reader of this page (thanks Rich) offered the following advice. 

KNOPPIX makes things read-only on purpose as it is intended to be a non-destructive demo of Linux. To write to a given volume:

1. Open a konsole session
2. At the prompt type the "su" command (switch user). When used without a parameter, it logs you on to the root account.
3. If volume you want to write to you is mounted already, dismount it using a command like  "umount /dev/sdb1"
4. Remount the volume with a command like  "mount /dev/sdb1"
   

Other Knoppix Gripes

Using: Knoppix Live CD version 4.0.2 running kernel version 2.6.12.

On a ThinkPad T42 laptop it detected FireWire at startup. The machine had no FireWire ports. 

Also on a ThinkPad T42 laptop, when the mouse hovers over hda1 and hda2 the file system is shown as Auto. It was really NTFS. 

I clicked on a big file and Open Office started up to process it. I waited and waited and waited while the poor hard disk was constantly active. Eventually wanted to kill Open Office for it seemed like it would never start up. Clicking the X did nothing. Closing it from the task bar was also ignored. There must be something akin to Task Manager, but I couldn't find it.