Knoppix Linux

Using Linux effectively is a learning process. One of the best ways to learn is to just dive in and try it. If you are new to Linux, you quickly discover another good way to learn is to fix something you accidentally broke. I consider myself ...

conf, and the new kernel won't boot!", or "Help I installed Windows after Linux and now I can't get back to lilo." Whatever the reason, all of us have run into situations where we have needed to restore lilo on a system that won't boot. T...

Lilo has been around longer, and many distributions default to installing it, but most also offer grub packages. Grub has many interesting features that have made it popular, including the ability to change kernels and basically any other g...

This segment contains two major parts: the boot code in the first 446 bytes and the partition table (plus a 2-byte signature) in the remaining 66 bytes. When you run lilo, grub-install, or fdisk /mbr in DOS, it writes to these first 446...

OK, so you had a little too much fun with the previous hack, ignored the warnings, accidentally typed 512 when you should have typed 446, and now your partition table is gone. Or maybe you accidentally ran fdisk on the wrong drive. No problem...

In the case of a drive with multiple partitions, you might end up moving one of the partitions to a second drive, back up the first drive, increase the size of the first partition, and restore. Of course, to back up and restore, you must have...

Most filesystem-repair utilities require that the partition to be repaired is not mounted, and for repairs to the / partition, it is necessary to use a repair disc such as Knoppix. One advantage to using Knoppix for filesystem repair is that ...

Unlike in the DOS days, you can't simply run through a list of undeleted filenames hoping your file hasn't been overwritten, because Linux unlinks a file when it is removed and no longer keeps track of it other than to note that the space is ...

If you don't believe me, search the Internet for "IBM Deathstar" (referring to problems in the 60GXP and 75GXP series of hard drives). While a three-year warranty guarantees you a replacement drive, if your drive fails, there is no way to r...

No problem. You can just restore them from your backup. If you don't back up all of your important files, then there's no time like the present to start. Knoppix comes with the venerable tar command, which is used by system administrators to ...

When this happens, it's time to buy a larger hard drive and migrate the system. While there are many different ways to copy files from one hard drive to another, some work better than others when transferring the full / directory. This hack o...

Knoppix comes with the major tools you need to create and modify Linux software RAID, and makes it very simple to create new software RAID drives. Linux software RAID supports many different styles of RAID, and this hack covers the three most...

If you want to migrate a system to software RAID, you might be faced with the prospect of doing a complete backup and restore. If you have a low budget, you might not have a spare drive to temporarily back up your data to in addition to the d...

Because of the way the RAID 1 array works, a two-disk array is expanded by buying two new larger hard drives. At this point, you might consider migrating over to RAID 5, because you can double your storage space by adding a single drive. A RAID...

With the ever-increasing storage needs in most businesses, you may find yourself needing to expand a RAID 5 array as well. You can replace all of the drives in the RAID with larger drives and copy all of the files over to the new, larger RAID...

Even if you have forgotten the root password, most Linux distributions let you log in to single-user mode (add the single or init=1 argument to the kernel at the boot prompt) and change the password from the root account. A paranoid syst...

Before you log in to a Linux system, a number of programs are automatically run to start various daemons and load services that the system needs. If your system uses a graphical login, then that program is also started at boot. If one of thes...

It might not then surprise you to know that Knoppix comes with many of Debian's packaging tools and is an excellent rescue disk for fixing Debian-specific problems. This hack describes how to downgrade a broken package that is stopping you fr...

With these tools, you can actually use Knoppix to repair packages on an RPM-based system that is preventing it from booting. This hack is actually very similar to [Hack #68], as it makes use of the --root option of rpm, which allows it to...

These kernels are generally very modular, which is fine, because it makes boot loader configuration simple—you have to configure only a single kernel. Unfortunately, if that kernel somehow gets deleted or corrupted, you have no way of booting...