Running Knoppix from a DOS prompt

[PetersonZF]

I'm trying to get Knoppix running on an old Pentium II (not sure what the clock speed or hard drive size are, but it has 256MB RAM) to get at some data on the hard drives. They're SCSI drives, so unfortunately, I can't just whip them out and plug them into a different machine, cos I don't have anything else compatible.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to want to boot from the Knoppix CD, despite giving the option to boot from CD ROM in BIOS. I'm assuming it's not loading the CD ROM drivers on boot up.

However, I can eventually get to a DOS prompt, at which point I can browse the files on the CD without issue.

So, is there an easy way to run Knoppix from the DOS prompt? (The machine does have a working floppy drive, incidentally.)

Thanks in advance. :)

[Harry Kuhman]

Knoppix does not run from DOS, Linux is a completely different OS.

It is a good sign that you can see files on the disc from DOS, that at least tells us that you didn't just copy the ISO to disc as one file, but we really don't have much info on your disc. Does it at least boot on your other systems? Was it burnt at slow speed?

On getting Knoppix to boot: we know the hard drives are SCSI. That should not be an issue as Knmoppix has support for several common SCSI controlers. What is the optical drive attached to, SCSI, IDE or something else? You say that the system can't boot the CD. Is there a BIOS option to boot from the type of CD interface that you are connected to? I'm thinking that you may want to get a copy of Smart Boot Manager, install SBM to a floppy (or to the computer's MBR), and then boot into SBM and use that to get the disc to boot. See the downloading faq for details.

[PetersonZF]

Yes, the CD works perfectly on other (newer) machines.

The optical drive is connected to an IDE channel. The BIOS appears to be giving the option to boot from an IDE CD ROM, but when it gets to the point where it starts to boot from it, it comes up with the standard "insert bootable media" style error.

I'll try Smart Boot Manager - thanks for the info.

[PetersonZF]

Darn, Smart Boot Manager didn't work. It runs fine, but the CD drive doesn't show up as an option to boot from, in the menu.

[Harry Kuhman]

Darn, Smart Boot Manager didn't work. It runs fine, but the CD drive doesn't show up as an option to boot from, in the menu.
That seems very strange, I always see SBM detect and offer the CD drive when it is on an IDE interface, even if the disc in it can't actually be booted. There is a feature in SBM that can rescan the drives (I forget the keystroke, look under F1), you might want to give that a try. Even push the drive button so the drive spins right before you do to try to coax it to see the drive. The drive does seem working if you can see the files on it from DOS, but I don't know what else to do to try to get Knoppix to boot.

[malaire]

Knoppix does not run from DOS, Linux is a completely different OS.


Actually, that just might be possible with loadlin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin)

I havn't tried that with Knoppix, so I can't give any additional help, but it might be worth checking out.

Unfortunately the official site doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

[PetersonZF]

Well, a friend put me onto this:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Boot_Floppies

So, I burnt DSL (which is based on Knoppix) onto a CD, made this (http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/bootfloppy.img) boot floppy and tried that.

Bingo, the machine worked - albeit with a horribly distorted GUI. Unfortunately, it couldn't mount the SCSI drives.

On a hunch, I tried putting the full Knoppix CD in, but using the DSL boot floppy and it loaded, although then I found that KDE wouldn't work. However, it was largely irrelevant because the console told me I still couldn't mount the SCSI drives, anyway.

So while it didn't work on this machine, the theory is still sound for a computer that refuses to boot from CD.

Thanks for your help, folks.

(Incidentally, I found another way to get the data, in the end.)