Love Knoppix

Wednesday night I finished up some work on my work XP laptop. Told it to shut down and went to bed. Got up Thursday morning to go to the office, and the thing had bluescreened. Crap, says I. Attempted to reboot, no joy. OH CRAP, says I. No time to mess with it. Head to the office, give laptop to systems guy..please fix, and I'd really not like to lose everything on the disk. I set up camp in a conference room that has a PC so I can get work done, he messes with the laptop all day.

About 4:30, he comes in with a list of things he's tried, including reinstalling XP over the current install, no worky. Shit, says I. I ask, "Did you try Knoppix?" No, what's that? Brief explanation of linux that runs on a CD. "You can't fix windows with Linux!" I ask for, and receive, the system disks that supposedly came with the laptop and an office 2003 disc, and take the whole mess home.

Yesterday, I get time to mess with it. I download knoppix with my ibook and burn a cd. Stick in the laptop, boots right up. Start the ssh server, fire up fugu on the iBook browse to the already-mounted hard disk, and start copying stuff over. Prolly should used rsync and copied the whole disk, but scp/sftp was the first thing I thought of. I've gotten back to it now, and am finishing the copying. Hopefully he gave me the right stuff to reinstall.

Only problem is, I don't have a clue as to what caused the meltdown. I will run spinrite on the drive, that's the only thing I can think of. I'm very diligent about virus scanning and spyware, though I don't rule that possibility out at all. The machine has been running knoppix for almost 2 days solid now with no sign of trouble.

LOVE knoppix, hate XP. Still.

Post #211,779 by Steve Lowe 6/20/05 3:29:38 PM Reply	Love Knoppix Wednesday night I finished up some work on my work XP laptop. Told it to shut down and went to bed. Got up Thursday morning to go to the office, and the thing had bluescreened. Crap, says I. Attempted to reboot, no joy. OH CRAP, says I. No time to mess with it. Head to the office, give laptop to systems guy..please fix, and I'd really not like to lose everything on the disk. I set up camp in a conference room that has a PC so I can get work done, he messes with the laptop all day. About 4:30, he comes in with a list of things he's tried, including reinstalling XP over the current install, no worky. Shit, says I. I ask, "Did you try Knoppix?" No, what's that? Brief explanation of linux that runs on a CD. "You can't fix windows with Linux!" I ask for, and receive, the system disks that supposedly came with the laptop and an office 2003 disc, and take the whole mess home. Yesterday, I get time to mess with it. I download knoppix with my ibook and burn a cd. Stick in the laptop, boots right up. Start the ssh server, fire up fugu on the iBook browse to the already-mounted hard disk, and start copying stuff over. Prolly should used rsync and copied the whole disk, but scp/sftp was the first thing I thought of. I've gotten back to it now, and am finishing the copying. Hopefully he gave me the right stuff to reinstall. Only problem is, I don't have a clue as to what caused the meltdown. I will run spinrite on the drive, that's the only thing I can think of. I'm very diligent about virus scanning and spyware, though I don't rule that possibility out at all. The machine has been running knoppix for almost 2 days solid now with no sign of trouble. LOVE knoppix, hate XP. Still. -- Steve
Post #211,791 by tjsinclair 6/20/05 5:09:11 PM Reply	Knoppix is pretty sweet I enjoy playing around with as many of the Live CD distributions. They make great handouts for my students. Tom Sinclair "This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here." -- The Bursar is a man under a lot of stress (Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
Post #211,803 by broomberg 6/20/05 6:42:49 PM Reply	Same here We bought a company recently. We moved their whole operation to our location. This included several Windows servers. Upon boot, one blue-screened and refused to go any further. We have a Windows admin (credentialed, with experience, as much as I hate his career path, I respect him). He was lost. 2 hours of premium M$ phone support - they said forget it, it's toast, throw away the hard disk. 10 minutes of Knoppix boot, files full accessable, copied off to the network. All better.

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