Knoppix - My saviour!

This is just to give a shout out to knoppix. Yesterday morning as I arrived at work a teacher came to me saying her laptop had died. I tested it and indeed, the hard drive was screwed, windows wouldn't load (no errors, just remained on loading screen) and you could hear it tearing itself to pieces if you listened closely.

She then informed me that she had two years worth of work on that laptop and (wait for it...) no backup whatsoever.

After trying several M$ procedures, I burnt an knoppix CD, booted it up and copied all the work on the HDD over to a flash drive and then to my own HDD (in several runs). It had just finished copying the final MB when the laptop HDD finally bit the bullet and caved in, crashing knoppix.

Now I have a very happy teacher and a very prized knoppix CD which will forever remain in my toolkit. :D

Three cheers to Tux!

I used it for a iffy machine today to same effect.

Get a hold of some other LiveCDs as well as Knoppix in case Knoppix doesn't recognise the hardware :) (It happened to me with a Fujitsu Laptop once)

regards

Simon

I can recommend the Trinity Rescue Kit (look, I have even googled it for you - not bad for a tuesday morning!) http://trinityhome.org/trk

This has a few handy features - AV scanning, for one. It can also "clone" a PC - stick TRK in duff PC, stick it in destination PC, bit of crossover cable... pokey pokey.. and voila, one cloned hard disk. Clever.

Also does file recover, windows password reset... and all for nowt :)

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(look, I have even googled it for you - not bad for a tuesday morning!)

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Not bad considering it's wednesday :)

Ben

Knoppix was my first experience with Linux a few months ago. Now I carry a copy of the CD in my work bag all over.

I've rescued documents form many duff hard drives in exactly the same scenario as you described.