Fix Your Catastrophic Screw-ups with Knoppix

Kyle Rankin

Author of Knoppix Hacks

What is Knoppix?

A complete Linux distribution that runs directly from a bootable CD-ROM, Knoppix has many uses:

When Do You Use a Rescue CD?

Knoppix the Rescue Disk

Catastrophic Screw-ups?

Death-(well MBR-)defying Live Demo!

Delete the complete Master Boot Record and restore it and grub using Knoppix

I Like My Laptop

How to Erase Your MBR

<insert disclaimer>

root@ttyp0[/]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

Boot Knoppix

Use console mode (boot with knoppix 2)

Not necessary, but saves time since all the recovery tools are command line based

Gpart

gpart (short for "Guess Partition") scans a drive for anything that looks like the beginning and end of a partition, then creates a MBR based on it

Run Gpart

Tweak the Results

gpart might not correctly find the end of all of your partitions. Use a tool like fdisk or cfdisk to recreate the partition to fill up its space in this case.

Fix Grub

Questions?

Other Resources