Linux Neophyte

I just wanted to thank the Knoppix project for making it soooo damn easy to save files from a Windows machine that simply refuses to boot.

Over the weekend my wife brought me a co-workers XP Home machine that would freeze following POST, you know, right about the time the system attempted to boot.. I planned on wiping the machine and using it’s recovery partition to restore the OS, and that’s what I did. Just before reloading the box, I burned a copy of the Knoppix 5.01 DVD, booted into the live KDE interface, mounted a samba share served by my Ubuntu desktop, and copied everything from the user’s profile on the broken box to my system. It was a breeze and took no time at all.

I’ve fixed similar problems in the past but it usually required physically moving the hard disk to a working system, copying the data off, moving the disk back, reloading it and then copying the user’s data back. I found that method to be preferable to mucking about with XP rescue, which I found to be hit or miss.

This is one of many reasons I’m loving the Linux experience. Knowing how to use a tool like Knoppix makes fixing things for others a pleasure instead of an annoyance. Looking back, the first time I tried Knoppix I couldn’t do much more than stare at it. Now, it just feels right. I can start it up, do what I need to and move on. The last few months have been a terrific learning experience.

For anyone interested in the commands I used to mount the samba share, I opened a terminal session on the Knoppix/Windows box and did the following:

mkdir Desktop/ubuntu

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.99/download Desktop/ubuntu -o user=matt

The first command created an “ubuntu” folder on my Knoppix desktop. The second mounted the “download” share from my Ubuntu machine (which has the IP address of 192.168.1.99) to the folder created in step one. The options at the end of the second command just specified that I wanted to connect as user “matt”. After entering my password I was ready to start dragging directories and files from the broken machine to the ~/Desktop/ubuntu mount.

I could have gone an even easier route, just opening konqueror and browsing to the share would have gotten me the same results. I prefer mounting via the command line, I want to have the options burned to into my memory so I can do it whether the box runs a GUI or not.

written by M@ \\ tags: Knoppix