Octopus Overlords

Just had a computer in here, our president's kids messed up their old laptop big time, and there was some big school project on there. (A log on their computer I found said that there were some 50 viruses/trojans/spyware on the machine!)

Didn't have a network card with it when they brought it in either...so how could I recover those files?

Well I downloaded a Knoppix ISO and burned it, and stuck it in the laptop, and a few minutes later up comes Linux, with windows (I think it uses KDE) and everything...the HDD is there (XP Pro drive) mounted, and I was able to browse through the files and find the word and XL documents (I could even open them via OpenOffice) - it was slow at times, seeing as each new computer had to be opened from the CD, but not too bad at all (this was an old Celeron 550)

So how did I get the files off? Well technically in this case, they would've fit zipped on a floppy - but I borrowed a USB key - and voila, it showed up - just had to choose mount, then make it writable, and I copied the files to the key, and thus to my own computer (and off to them via email). (scanned 'em good of course)

Good stuff, especially with a heavily infected machine - because the OS is burned to CD-ROM, no virus can touch it. Also it can read NTFS files, and it can even reset NT passwords...about the only time you might SOL is if they were encrypted - but even then in theory you could at least recover the files and try to decrypt later.

Cool stuff.

For sure!

I don't know what I would do wothout knoppix and the Ultimate Boot CD.

So did you get approval for the Treo? I'd have said, "Mr. G, I can get your kids project for you but I think I need a Treo for the job." He would have said, "Oui!"

Love knoppix!

Austin wrote:So did you get approval for the Treo? I'd have said, "Mr. G, I can get your kids project for you but I think I need a Treo for the job." He would have said, "Oui!"

That would be CLM! Besides so long as I don't have a Treo they can't email me at all hours right?

KNoppix is great. 50 spyware/trojans programs is nothing, though. We routinely see kids computers with thousands of viruses, trojans, and spyware programs. You'd be amazed at the amount of crap on most college kids computers. Nice work for your boss, though. If the layoffs ever come, you've just ensured that you won't be on the list.

get a external cd burner and you can rescue the bosses porn, er, "digital photograghy projects" and burn them to a cd. You can copy the whole damn directory, rather than trying to fit them on a floppy or a flashdrive. Love it!

Default wrote:get a external cd burner and you can rescue the bosses porn, er, "digital photograghy projects" and burn them to a cd. You can copy the whole damn directory, rather than trying to fit them on a floppy or a flashdrive. Love it!

When I was backing up before my last rebuild I just used my 40g Creative Zen and backed up most of my files onto it. Hard Drive based Mp3 players are good for more than just music.

Knoppix and a decent sized USB key or external USB hard drive is your best friend. Like you said, you can access the drives from an OS that not only would be impervious to the windows Virus, but it running from a read-only CDROM on top of that.

It is great to be able to have that kind of flexibility to boot up on almost any hardware config and extract data, get on the net to download or upload files, do research on whatever the problem is, etc...

Last year I built an SFF gaming rig. Newegg sent everything but the HD. So for 3 days I had an entire PC but no hard drive to put in it. So for 3 days I booted up from a Knoppix CD and was online visiting forums, checking and printing email, using IM, etc... WIth no HD in the computer.

A friend of mine at work had her HD blow up on her laptop and corporate took a week to get her a new one. I gave her a Knoppix CD but it had some sort of issue with her laptop hardware, so I went through my CD pack and found one that booted, Overclockix...

She was online, accessing her Salesforce.com dbase and writing up quotes, accessing Outlook email via our web portal, etc... all without a HD installed.

Bootable Linux discs rock.