Got Knoppix 5.0.1 successfully booting from USB key

[NAvAP]

Is there a way to either make another partition or hide the Knoppix related files from showing up when the usb drive is inserted into Windows.

Or at the least be able to put both the Boot and Knoppix folder into one folder '~' so that it would be at the top and out of the way for any other software I put on the drive. It's a 4GB drive so I will be putting alot of Windows software on there as well.

[xtronics]

I've found it easy to make copies of this boot drive with:

dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/sdy

You can even keep a back-up as a file

dd if=/dev/sdx of=/path/to/backupname

I am trying to make a grub setup where I can choose to boot into freeDOS.

[pintree3]

Maybe I shouldn't be here since much written here is for more experienced users--if so feel free to tell me off but be nice enough to redirect me to where I should be.

see PC specs at end

In the Knoppix info page (www.knopper.net) ' it says as minimum requirements, 'Intel-compatible CPU' is AMD an Intel compatible? or is AMD, amd and therefore have nothing to do with Intel. Sounds like a stupid Q but 'compatible' can mean 'anything like it' therefore AMD or can mean Intel and only Intel.

Assuming AMD is fine, the next stuff I read has to do with NTFS-where problems arise. Here I got confused, since I assumed we are talking about booting from Knoppix, then this would over-ride anything to do with Windows and the fact that the drive was configured as NTFS. Or am I wrong here?

I can not burn Knoppix to CD hence my need for having done so to a USB 1G flash drive. I configured my BIOS to boot from the USB (the acceptable one being USB.zip) and it begins booting, the POST shows the flash drive, it then shows, "Verifying DMI pool Data" The flashing cursor can be seen write below it and nothing else happens.
Yes i did check the iso with the suggested software, so the download is complete and proper. I used daemon tools to get the image. I then copied all files within it to my USB. I then renamed the USB flash to KNOPPIX.

Now, should the following be of relevance I will etll you why I feel a need for this LiveCD. And it is because I can not boot into my Windows. Even after a chkdsk, Recovery Console command, 'fixboot' and reformatting the C: drive before and after the above. I keep on getting the "invalid partition table' message.

OS: Windows XP home OEM
Hardware: Computer: no brand name --OEM
AMD 64 Athlon 3500+,
MSI ‘K8N Neo4 motherboard, nVidia chipset based
nVidia GeForce LE Graphics card.
RAM 2 gig,
DVD: LiteOn DVD-rw SHM
CD: Lite-on LTR-52246 (CD-rw)
Floppy: none
Kitchen Stove: Just kidding
BIOS: Award ver. V1.D 052206 11:35:51
Note: in BIOS Standard CMOS settings IDE Primary Master and Slave are set to [none]. The Secondary Master is the DVD drive and the Secondary Slave is the CD drive. While the IDE Third Master is the HD ‘WDC WD1600JS-60MH
Drive C: and D: NTFS Drives E: and F: FAT32

This is way too long so you may not want to read further but just in case someone wants to know what the original problem as and why I came here I have included it.

Brief description, (Should you not have time to read the rest):
Windows XP home begins installing then after it reboots it begins the process again as if it never formatted or began installation. If I change the boot order (from CD 1st to HD 1st) It will read “Invalid Partition Table�. Prior to this attempt at installing Windows, it would not start neither in safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, previous installation, etc.

How the problem may have come about:

All was working relatively fine (‘relatively’ because I was having a problem with the computer hanging when going online possibly due to some ignorant use of a registry cleaner). Anyhow, all was working ‘relatively’ fine for the last 2 months, then after a torrent DVD download was complete I, on my uTorrent client, accidentally clicked on “Delete Torrent and data�. I then proceeded to use about 15 unerase/recovery programs most of which gave negative results—One found what I had lost but being trial I was not able to retrieve these files without payment. During this process the computer was rebooted 3X without problems and hung during the use of one program called ‘iRecover’ [It had previously warned me that my nVidia Chipset may cause problems and that a hanging may occur and if it did to change to the windows driver. Therefore after the hang I did reboot and uninstalled this software]. The reboot was normal.

After this reboot and uninstall I ask myself the question, “Is it worth it for me to pay for this software for only this one DVD?� Saying no I made my big mistake-perhaps. I go to serial/hack pages trying to find a serial key. As I go from page to page I decide this is not a good idea.
Meanwhile uTorrent downloading stuff; I continue to do email; use “Microsoft Word�, listen to music, and view pictures. This goes on for hours.

The following day, having realized that I haven’t rebooted my computer in a day I do so but now it hangs. I wait about 5 minutes and force a shutdown. It did not reboot. It went to the step ‘Windows is loading’ and nothing further. I rebooted a few times to no avail.

My 160 gig HD is divided into 4 partitions—C, D, E, F, where ‘C’ is where the OS was. C and D were NTFS partitions and E, F were FAT 32.

I place my Windows XP Home Edition CD (OEM legitimate copy) in the DVD Drive rebooted changed the boot order to choose DVD drive first but nothing happened. By this I mean nothing—the computer did not start, did not recognize the CD etc. It stopped at a dim light-blue screen—not the usual bright blue screen.

Remembering a past trick I placed a “Windows 98SE� CD and it did boot up to it. And here I saw something funny it said that Volume drive label C was my E, that Volume drive D was F etc. subsequently a ‘dir’ command did show that in fact the files in C were actually those of E etc.(In seeing this I asked is this correct or is this Windows98 thinking wrongly).

I then did a ‘chkdsk’ and had many prompts warnings of a sort whereby I chose one of them. [My apologies here for not being able to give more details for my memory fails me]. Thinking this was a bad idea. I rebooted.

Luckily, or so I thought, it now did recognize the Windows XP Home CD. But then the next bad news—there was no “C� drive. I chose the 1st top as the place to put my NTFS installation—which then became “Partition1 [New RAW]�. BTW the size for the partition was already there.

The copying files and all that begins—I am happy but worried since Win98 CD said that C was E (Was I. I asked myself, therefore formatting and deleting my E drive contents since C was maybe E?). The initial copying finishes and the PC reboots. But it won’t recognize that an installation has begun and instead the process of installing Windows begins. I did so again and again and….but same story. Each time changing the BIOS setting for the boot sequence.

One may note that it took a very long time, about 10 minutes, for the PC to reboot and recognize the cd. Then on the 2nd reboot I waited about another 5 minutes and this time I got the 3 choices, -1- install, -2- Recovery Console -3- reboot

I chose recovery console and in the black screen a ‘dir’ command showed the 4 partitions normally (unlike windows 98 but do recall a formatting of ‘C’ has happened by now).
I formatted the drive and through RC (recovery console) formatted the C drive again and reinstalled, again after the reboot Windows did not recognize that an installation had begun.
Back to the long wait and RC. This time I do the following command (without the quotes, naturally�): “format C: /fs/ntfs�
And nothing, all is the same as before. Back to RC and I do the following command on all 4 drives: “chkdsk /p /r�. RC finds irrecoverable errors on C, finds and recovers some errors on the other 3 partitions. (a future chkdsk on c: I ‘think’ did not find irrecoverable errors)

On reboot the screen asks for installation/setup; I do so and this time there is a ‘C’ drive so portioning/formatting is done on this C drive. But again and again the computer doesn’t recognize that an installation had begun. If I go to my BIOS and choose to boot from the HD (and do so) I see the following, “Invalid Partition Table�.
Back on RC (Recovery Console) I did a ‘Fixboot’ command and still nothing.
I hesitate to ask, “Where did I go wrong� for your list may be endless.
Note: On my PC details above I showed that the IDE Third Master is my HD. When I boot up I don’t see this IDE Third Master—the screen goes up too quickly and pressing the pause key on the keyboard doesn’t seem to work—so maybe it’s there or maybe it isn’t all I do get to see is the DVD and CD drives. Going on the Recovery Console however does show the drives and its contents so, one could assume the hard rive ‘is’ there.

I have thought of formatting the other 3 partitions as well but I really need the stuff (stupidly unbacked up) on them. If I must, I can repartition/format my ‘D’ [ ‘E’ and ‘F’ have important personal info, like letters, and other stuff.].

One Google search showed that the problem may be bad RAM, the PC is 4 months old, and to the best of my knowledge and according to a RAM testing software it is fine. If it is a boot virus I have no clue how to do anything about this.

There is one command on RC that I question if I should use—‘FIXMBR’. A help on it says, If FIXMBR detects an invalid or non-standard partition table signature, it prompts you before rewriting the master boot record [MBR]�. I tried the command and it said, that ‘it may damage all my partition tables. This could cause all the partitions on the current hard disk to become inaccessible.� So I cancelled it. Finally, in rebooting I do get a short beep, which, according to A BIOS website may mean, “DRAM refresh failure’.

So what does one suggest? I do have an external 30G hard drive (USB connection) and a 1Gig flash drive, and my 4-year old Acer TravelMate 270, all of which I hopefully can use to help this if necessary.

You have read this far, you are a hero and worthy of praise.

[Harry Kuhman]

Pintree3: AMD is fine. UBS booting is very problem prone however. many computers that claim to be able to boot from USB in the BIOS just will not do it. Others make an effort but still have problems. Good luck to you, but if you are having problems getting your system to boot USB it might or might not be that the device was set up wrong.

I strongly suggest that before you fool with this falsh device further you run Knoppix from a disc as it is intended. You make a vague statement that you can't make a CD, but I have no idea why. If all else fails put that ISO (I assumed you confirmed the md5 sum) onto the flash device and take it to a friend who could burn the ISO, burning it properly, as an image (see the downloading faq for details if needed).

[pintree3]

HI thanks bro--truly thanks

What I meant by i could not make a CD was that my cd and dvd burner is attatched to the defected PC and my laptop does not have a burner. BUt yes having realized that it was meant to be burned to CD i went over to a friend's and did exaclty that--and voila, though slow to get there, it did. And wow, what a surprise this LInux thing seems to be truly wonderful--WHy did I wait so long? (fear).
But now that I am there (and no I'm not writing to you thru it) I have no clue as to how I can move my folders from the drives to an external USB HDD or my laptop. What I am seeing is, 'sda5, sda6 etc.' instead of C:, D: etc. I tried to copy (Can't find how to move) but I get an error saying I can't do so (the exact message from the conqueror window is, 'Could not write to /media/sda7/ninjaiBird.jpg'). When I R-click on 'Copy to' I do see the actua; drives as written by WIndowsXP but how do I get there (the the C, D, instead of sd5, sd6)?

side note: the error message seems to say that it can't write to the jpg? how can this be so? Of course it can't writ to a jpg. I am r-clikcing on the jpeg which I want to copy to another folder and then it is saying it can't write to itself but on another folder? Confused!! I don't want to writ to the jpg I want to copy that jpg to another folder/drive.

[Harry Kuhman]

Sounds like you need to do some reading. These questions have been covered in these forums many times before, as well as elsewhere on the web. I'll give you some quick answers but will not wite a full Linux tutorial however.

Windows uses letter like C and D for partitions. They don't tell you much and can even move around under windows when you add new partitions (breaking installed software). Linux uses discriptive names, like hda for the first hard drive on the primary IDE connection, and hda1 (note the number) for the first partition on hda. hda5 is the first logical drive (partition on an extended partition). These letterrs will not move unless you recable drives. Different type of interfaces use different letters, such as sda1 being a partition on a serial or usb device (or maybe scsi).

You can use the mount command (see man mount) to mount partitions, or you should be able to click on desktop icons that Knoppix uses to show you the partitions that you have. See answer 6 for details about making the partitions writeable, for safety reasons Knopppix defaults to read-only mounting.

If you are about to embrace Linux fully and move lots of stuff to it, I would urge you to consider the final goal here. Knoppix is a fine Live CD. It's not so great as a permanent OS. You would likely be much better off, if you like Knoppix, to install Debian, the intended for hard disk OS that Knoppix is based on. You can get the net-install ISO for Debian Etch here. Yes, it's an iso, so you would either make another trip to your friend, or you can burn the ISO directly in Knoppix, but doing a CD burn in Knoppix requires that you have the disc drive free, so you'll either need two optical drives or a gig of memory to let you use the knoppix toram cheat code at boot time to load all of Knoppix to memory and free up the CD burner. (There are smaller Linux Live CDs like DSL that are handy to have for just this reason, they can be loaded to RAM in most systems and will free up the CD drive for burning.)

Welcome to Linux. Be warned that all is not roses here; in particular wifi support is not great and thanks to more and more manufacturers making drivers that are Windows only it's getting worse, not better, but there are more positives than negatives.

[gturrill]

Knoppix 5.0.1 boots rather nicely from a USB key. It's getting easier to get it working, as the USB bugs from the previous versions have been fixed.

and 5.1.1 on a 2Gb key too. I am composing this in Iceweasel after booting from the 2gb key. I followed Krellan2's instructions, with the modification for the 2Gb drive.

I am running a Dell Latitude D820 with an 80Gb SATA drive which is setup to dual-boot WinXP and Fedora Core 6. The NTFS partition is /dev/sda2 and the USB is /dev/sdb4.

when Knoppix sets itself up, it mounts the /dev/sdb4 partition as /cdrom, which is fine, but it also mounts /dev/sda2 as /cdrom as well. If I attempt to umount /cdrom I get the message that /cdrom is mounted multiple times.

Is there a way to prevent /dev/sda2 from being mounted as /cdrom. I have include the /etc/fstab from the Knoppix session below

knoppix@Knoppix:~$ cat /etc/fstab 
/proc      /proc       proc   rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0 
/sys       /sys        sysfs  rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0
/dev/shm   /dev/shm    tmpfs  rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0
/dev/pts   /dev/pts    devpts mode=0622           0 0
/dev/fd0   /media/fd0  auto   user,noauto,exec,umask=000    0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom  auto   user,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/hdc  /media/hdc  auto   users,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,shortname=winnt,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 ntfs noauto,users,exec,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/sda5 /media/sda5 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,shortname=winnt,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/sda6 /media/sda6 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/sda7 /media/sda7 auto noauto,users,exec 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/sdb4 /media/sdb4 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000,shortname=winnt,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0

[MrGreen]

Hi,

I have just manages to get knoppix [5.1.1] on my TrekStor 8g pendrive without too many problems

mkdiskimage and copying over files too forever lol but it worked

wiki page does not mention read/write mode for device?

I'm very happy all I have left to do is some tweaks to syslinux.cfg maybe set home a persistent home then good to go....

Thanks for a great howto & for sharing

MrG

[Krellan2]

Hi,

I have just manages to get knoppix [5.1.1] on my TrekStor 8g pendrive without too many problems

mkdiskimage and copying over files too forever lol but it worked

Nice. You might be the first in this thread to try on an 8GB USB key.

Yes, mkdiskimage would take a long time. It reformats the entire key.

What was the mkdiskimage command you used? I'm guessing it was something like:
mkdiskimage -F -4 /dev/sda 0 255 63

You'd have to use 0 255 63 instead of 0 64 32, since 0 64 32 is only for the old USB-ZIP "standard" which maxes out at 1GB.

You'd have to use -F, for FAT32, since FAT16 maxes out at 2GB.

8GB is the barrier at which the old CHS standard also maxes out. I'm surprised it was able to work at all. Your USB key must be just under 8GB, perhaps 7.62 GB or so. 8,000,000,000 bytes to the company's PR department, but 7.62 GB to you

It's good to be a little under 8GB because your cylinder count will still be under the 1024 barrier. I'm guessing your cylinder count was around 972 or so.

Once we get USB keys above 8GB, the CHS standard won't work any more, and I have some ideas for working around that. A starting point is to hack the mkdiskimage script slightly, to change the FAT32 partition type byte it creates, from 0x0B (FAT32 CHS) to 0x0C (FAT32 LBA).

wiki page does not mention read/write mode for device?

Not sure what you mean by this. Edit the Wiki page, if you feel that it is missing an important piece of information.

I'm very happy all I have left to do is some tweaks to syslinux.cfg maybe set home a persistent home then good to go....

Thanks for a great howto & for sharing

You're welcome!

I'm envious of your 8GB key, you can put the entire Knoppix DVD (not CD!) on there with room to spare. Big persistent home directory. Then, a full PortableApps installation, for use with Windows. Lots of space left over for transferring files and any additional PortableApps you feel like having. I'll have to pick one of those up myself someday....

[MrGreen]

Hi,

I mean you have to change read/write mode on mounted device [you know right click icon on desktop]

used

mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 0 255 63

so as you say its just under 8gb [fat16]

 sdd4        Boot        Primary   FAT16                             7994.98

Was not my intension to put knoppix on it was more for backup for my laptop ... but as your how to states you need a 1gb or more

Knoppix dvd emmm it would take forever to copy over to key

Have ordered a 1gb drive so may put 5.1.1 [cd] on that

One thing that I could not get on there was persistent home it ran up to 96% then stopped maybe I could do it from cd & put it on usbdrive

Think lang=<foo> has to go on end of line but I'll check that not sure if its gb or uk lol anyway not a problem

As you say usb booting is hit and miss some machines it works other well nothing I know my old system never worked at all, been running usb knoppix on my laptop no problem ... not tried my desktop yet

Something others may like to try [if not already been said!] is stick a hard drive in an external enclosure small old drives are cheap and easy to pick up, enclosures are not that expensive. Always handy to have for backup

If you need any testing output or just a beer let me know

MrG