Number 288 - May 2007

Knoppix to the Rescue
by Cass Lewart (rlewart@monmouth.com), ACGNJ
As tax time is approaching, I assembled all my income and expense items and entered them in the TaxAct program, which arrived recently for free in the mail, courtesy of H&R Block. I was also working on two PowerPoint presentations, one on GPS for the Trenton Computer Festival and one on High Definition TV for our computer club. I thought that I was making backups as I was moving along, but I was not 100% sure where those backups were. If you could see my desk with dozens of CDs, floppies and memory sticks floating around, you would understand the problem.    Well, it happened. My dual-boot Windows 2000 Professional system, where I kept all the data, would not boot or would keep rebooting. It worked fine the evening before but not the next morning. I remembered that it happened to me once before on another dual boot drive as soon as I installed Service Pack 3, required for some programs. I tried the Windows repair utility, I tried to reinstall Windows, all to no avail. I could not even get into Safe Mode. At one point the system asked me for password, though I never use one, and refused to continue. No password--no entry!    I started looking for my backups, but those I could find were not the recent ones. Only one chance remained--Knoppix! Knoppix is a version of Linux which fits on one self-booting CD. Knoppix was developed by Klaus Knopper, who gave it the name. There is also an expanded version of Knoppix which fits on a DVD. When I asked my son what is the difference between the CD and DVD versions, he told me that on DVD I will get lots of programs which I will never use. Knoppix is free under the open source GNU license and can be downloaded from many	mirror sites. The GNU Project (GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix") was launched in 1984 to develop a complete free Unix-like operating system. After downloading you have to "burn" a CD in ISO format.    To run Knoppix you set your computer to boot from a CD. Most often it is accomplished by pressing F8 during the boot process and then selecting CD-ROM as the first boot device. You then insert the Knoppix CD in the drive and continue the booting process. Knoppix then starts by recognizing various hardware devices in your computer such as floppies, hard drives, memory sticks, sound and video cards, modems, Internet connections and so on. In my opinion Knoppix recognizes hardware devices better than any Windows OS.    As Knoppix is running from the CD it will recognize a defective hard drive which will not boot, and display its contents. One can then copy the recovered files from that drive to a memory stick or floppy. I easily found the two Power Point presentations and copied them to a memory stick. The tax data was a little more difficult to locate as TaxAct stores the data five levels deep. I found the location by running TaxAct on another computer. The Knoppix file search function could not locate the file without a little help. Now I had all the important stuff recovered. I was even able to watch the PowerPoint presentation with OpenOffice, included on the Knoppix CD, and listen to various sound clips with player utilities on the CD.    Besides being a recovery tool, Knoppix CD gives you a complete set of utilities for most of your computing tasks. The current version of Knoppix is 5.1. Klaus, thank you, you came to the rescue!
Number 288 - May 2007