Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Knoppix

Dave and or Kev told me about knoppix awhile ago. I have version 3.3 ISO on my HD and when I can't find the cd I just burn out a new one. some day I'll actually start writing what is on the cd ON the cd so I know what is on the cd... ok.. nuf of that.

anyway.. in the never ending qwest [kevs phone company] to get jens laptop back up and running I first start with a data backup. seems simple enough right?

welp.. xp 'recovery' console is about as worthless as it comes. maybe you can do alot in it, but I'm not one to waste my time and find out. I can't figure out how to see network stuff from recovery console, and i can't figure out how to see external USB drives from recovery console, so short of actually recovering anything, theres nothing I can do with it. since I was UNABLE to get xp to start back up (despite a manual uninstall of SP2 from the console) I have turned to Knoppix.

yeah.. I suck at linux, some day i'll learn, we picked up the phone, called neal and he gave me a quick rundown on how to connect across the network with samba shares. worked like a champ. heres my notes for when i have to repeat this in a month when the laptop crashes again.

from within the console of knoppix
see if I can see the XP box
Type: ping 192.168.0.5
view my network settings
Type: ifconfig
To make sure we have samba services stuff
Type: smbclient
To see what we have mounted
Type: Mount
for a little different view use
Type: ls -la /mnt
Change directory to MNT
Type: CD /mnt
To view what we got
Type: ls
Make a new mount called network
Type: mkdir network
This didn't run because I didn't have the right access
so we need to act like we have root access?
Type: sudo mkdir network
View that we made it
Type: ls
Mount our network share
Type: sudo mount //192.168.0.5/shared ./network -t smbfs
now we see its in the mount list
Type: mount

To view our new mount point in the graphical environment, open a browser and for the URL
Type: file:/
and now we get to browse our mount points.

for some reason i don't have root access when knoppix starts up. when I try to write to my network share it says I don't have rights. I know the sudo command works at the shell window, so I use that to recursive copy to network share
Type: sudo cp * /mnt/nwhd/jen -r


a quick comparison to DOS helps me learn more.
http://www.satlug.org/~dubose/linux_basic_commands.html

4 comments:

forkev said...

laptops solution = bart-pe.
it loads the entire castrated xp install machine, and lets you INSTALL programs in it - plus it reads native ntfs.
therefore, load part-pe. ftp to distant computer and grap you gui ftp software and archiver.
choose your folders, compress them, and ftp them off the machine.

for desktops i've taken to ripping the HD out of the machine, putting it in a usb/firewire mountable external device, and doing it that way. less overhead. the screwdriver wins again.

Daniel said...

I had a drive crash a few months back... 160GB mother so getting a raw copy of it was a bit challenging... :)

The drive would cause windows to hang if I tried to touch it with disk manager or explorer etc.. previous to that it had started corrupting files and bad sectors showed up on the surface scan. No big deal right just RMA it... well Maxtor told me that it had to fail their diagnostics... after much ado I got their diagnostics to run and low-level formatted the drive. The drive has been working fine every since. Took about 30 hours to do the low-level format but it fixed whatever the problem was, go figure.

forkev said...

nice go, dan.
any details about the low level format: was it included with the maxtor diagnosics?

k2h said...

so maxtors policy is that if the drive is faililng something, its not the hardware, its your bloody software! i'd have never believed it. an amazing story.