Link: Knoppix Linux.

I just had to give a shoutout to the folks who do Knoppix. My Linux box at work seized up Monday and it looked like I was going to lose a bunch of important stuff (e.g. muttrc, vimrc …). My root partition had horked itself for no particular reason and I was unable to even boot to a command prompt (the kernel panics if it cannot mount the root partition). I spent Monday afternoon downloading the Knoppix ISO and burnt myself a CD to bring into the office.

After some initial problems getting Knoppix to run (it kept booting into X and my crappy monitor just refused to show anything; solution: type "knoppix 2" at the lilo prompt), I got a shell on my linux box. I did some poking around and ran a fsck on my root partition. The journal on the partition was corrupted and fsck fixed it by deleting the journal (thus reverting it back to ext2). After fsck was done, I was able to boot my Linux box and recover a whole bunch of stuff. I used the box the rest of the day but the disk appears flaky. I’ve noticed some long pauses while typing which I have not been able to attribute to anything (but I’m guessing disk problems).

Once again, thanks Knoppix!!! And thanks Knoppix Hacks for giving me the idea to use Knoppix in the first place.