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asachdeva
09-23-2009, 03:47 PM
Hi,
I dont have administrator rights on the PC. Its Hard disk is NTFS and is read only. Can I boot the System with a knoppix CD and a USB drive as temporary data storage medium ? Can I mount the drive in read only mode ?

At present it is unable to boot and throws me to a limited shell which does not even have ls command.

Regards
-dumb

Harry Kuhman
09-23-2009, 03:53 PM
You can boot without a hard drive, and Knoppix can read the hard drive anyway unless it is encrypted, as it doesn't care about Windows settings like account privileges. Your error is most often caused by problems reading the disc and is frequently the result of a high speed burn or a bad drive.

asachdeva
09-23-2009, 04:20 PM
You can boot without a hard drive, and Knoppix can read the hard drive anyway unless it is encrypted, as it doesn't care about Windows settings like account privileges. Your error is most often caused by problems reading the disc and is frequently the result of a high speed burn or a bad drive.

I have used the disk to boot another machine where I had full privileges. It is a core 2 duo machine, If I boot it using FreeDOS CD, I am unable to mount C drive. So it is something about the system. Can knoppix boot with absolutely no access to disk ?

-dumb

Harry Kuhman
09-23-2009, 04:38 PM
Booting on another system proves nothing, high speed burns tend to work on some systems but not on other systems even when good low speed burns work on both systems. I don't know that this is a high speed burn issue, but if you posted that to refute what I said, it is irrelevant.

I have no idea what you feel the FreeDOS CD boot indicates. I doubt that it can read NTFS.

Knoppix does not check Windows privileges for the various accounts at all. You can run Knoppix with no hard disk at all, you can run it on a system with an encrypted drive (although you can't read the files on an encrypted drive), and you can run it on a system that you can not log in to and still read all of the files. Do not try to write to NTFS with Knoppix, but reading is fine.

Clinton
09-23-2009, 04:51 PM
Your inability to mount C in FreeDOS does not indicate there is a particular fault with the system that is also preventing Knoppix from booting. And you don't need to have a hard disk in the PC to boot with Knoppix.

As Harry says, it could well be the speed of the CD burn (though people sometimes have trouble believing that particularly when they've seen the disk work on another PC).

If you bought the CD using the link on our Get Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net/get.php) page, this would be the first case of that supplier's disk failing and they would gladly change it for you (or PM me). If you created the disk yourself, do you remember the speed at which you did the burn?