Uses for Knoppix

by Variable Rush

A few months ago, I received a phone call from a friend who had a computer problem.  His Windows registry had corrupted itself and he needed me to figure out a way to save his files so they wouldn't be overwritten when he reinstalled Windows.

I had started reading a few Linux magazines and tried a few different distributions, so I figured that the best bet for saving his stuff would be to use a copy of Knoppix, my portable 40 GB hard drive, and his Windows CD for the reinstallation.  For this procedure, I used the CD version of Knoppix 5.0.1 which was released in 2006.  Knoppix can be downloaded free from www.knoppix.net.

Knoppix is a distribution of Linux and is named for Klaus Knopper, its inventor.  Similarly, Linux is named for Linus Torvalds.  Knoppix is an example of what is called a Live CD.

This means that to run Knoppix, all you have to do is turn your computer on, insert the disc in your optical drive, and make sure your BIOS is set up to boot from the optical drive.

It's mostly used to show a potential convert to Linux what a Linux environment looks like and how it works, and so Knoppix includes quite a number of applications.

The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of how to do this and also to explain another possible application of Knoppix which is a bit more interesting.  Although Knoppix does support burning CDs, I was unable to test this, because the test computers had less than 1 GB of RAM.  Knoppix requires this much RAM if it is to be able to load itself into memory, thus giving you access to the entire CD's contents and enabling you to free up the optical drive.

Once loaded, Knoppix's interface is a standard K Desktop Environment (KDE) much like most versions of Windows.  In the upper-left corner of the screen are icons depicting the Knoppix CD; a floppy drive, regardless of whether or not a floppy drive is actually installed; the installed hard drives, each partition mounted as though it was a separate physical drive; a trash can; and any attached USB devices, such as my portable hard drive.

I found that, while Knoppix would see the data on my friend's computer, it would only open files kept in a FAT32 filesystem.  Also, it would only transfer files to a portable device formatted with FAT32.  Unfortunately, my friend had his computer set to NTFS.  It didn't take long to reformat my portable HD to FAT32.

Once the drive was reformatted, I had to find his stuff.

On his computer, his "My Computer", "My Music", "My Documents", and "My Pictures" folders were found by clicking on hda1, "Documents and Settings', and "Owner".

This brought up a window in which I was able to find his "Desktop" folder, which contains all of the MPs, documents, and program links on the "Desktop".

Bringing the "Desktop" folder over to the portable hard drive was as easy as dragging and dropping.

Under the "Desktop" folder was "My Documents", which, when clicked on, brought up the full contents of my friend's "My Documents" folder.

This also includes the "My Music", "My Pictures", and "My Videos" folders.  Again, rescuing these folders is as easy as dragging and dropping.  If you have files in other folders to be rescued, all you have to do is try to remember the path to get to them.

Now, after having been proclaimed my friend's greatest computer-tech friend, I started thinking about how else Knoppix could be used.  Obviously, everything that has such great uses must have some dark secret, a use that the designers didn't intend on people using.  It took me all of three seconds to figure out what it was: hacking into a password-protected Windows machine.

This is because Knoppix allows you to boot up a computer, bypass Windows (or whatever operating system you're using), but still have access to the files and folders on that computer.  To test this theory, I created a file called Secret_Data.txt on the desktops of two computers.  One computer was password-protected, and the other was not.

With Knoppix, I was able to find the file and drag it over to my thumb drive in a matter of seconds on both computers.  I loaded Windows on another computer and was able to open both files.

So, you can see the possibility of being able to wreak havoc with nothing more than a CD and a thumb drive.