Why is Knoppix so great?
Here’s an application of backing up your hard drive to a windows shared drive.
I can boot up with a knoppix 5.1.1 livecd, enter knoppix 2 at the boot prompt, wait for it to boot and then mount my windows network drive with mount.cifs like so:
mkdir /mnt/mydrive
mount.cifs //192.168.1.100/my_shared_drive /mnt/mydrive -o user=myuser,pass=mypass
Then I can backup my 10GB drive to a file with:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/mydrive/myimagefile
Note that I'm mounting a NTFS partition over the network so I can have filesizes greater than 4GB with CIFS.
Also I've set my router up to give fixed IP addresses for each machine so I know what it's IP is without having to login to the router to find out the list of attached devices.
About 90 mins later, voila! An image file of my entire hard drive. How great is that??? CIFS is soooo sweet.
USING KNOPPIX TO MOUNT THE IMAGE FILE PARTITIONS
fdisk -l -u /mnt/mydrive/myimagefile shows me the partition table of my imagefile
-l flag lists the partitions
-u flag gives the partitions in sector sizes
Disk /mnt/mydrive/myimagefile: 0 MB, 0 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/mnt/mydrive/myimage1 * 63 8195039 4097488+ b W95 FAT32
/mnt/mydrive/myimage2 8195040 19625759 5715360 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/mnt/mydrive/myimage5 8195103 12292559 2048728+ b W95 FAT32
63 * 512 = 32256
8195103 * 512 = 4195892736
and if I multiply the start sector by 512, I can mount a partition directly from the image file
mkdir /mnt/part1
mkdir /mnt/part2
mount -t vfat /mnt/mydrive/myimage /mnt/part1 -o loop,offset=32256
mount -t vfat /mnt/mydrive/myimage /mnt/part2 -o loop,offset=4195892736
1U Supermicro Server 10 Bay 2x Intel Xeon 3.3Ghz 8C 128GB RAM 480GB SSD 2x 10GBE
$297.00
HP/HPE ProLiant AMD Opteron X3216 APU 16 GB RAM MicroServer Gen 10 NO DRIVES
$299.99
HP ProLiant Xeon E3-1220L V2 MicroServer Gen8 2.30 GHz 16 GB RAM NO DRIVES
$199.99
HP ProLiant Xeon E3-1220L V2 2.30 GHz 16 GB RAM MicroServer Gen8 NO DRIVES
$199.99
HP ProLiant HSTNS-5151 Micro Server 8GB RAM No Drives/Key/Caddies *READ*
$94.99
SuperMicro Server 505-2 Intel Atom 2.4GHz 8GB RAM SYS-5018A-FTN4 1U Rackmount
$202.49
HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus v2 Ultra Micro Tower Server - 1 x Intel Xeon
$846.19
Supermicro 5018A-FTN4 Rack Server - Black
$125.00
SUPERMICRO CSE-512 AMD Opteron Processor 6128, 32GB DDR3 RAM NO HDD
$90.00
2U 12 Bay SAS3 SuperMicro Server 6028U-TR4T+ W/ X10DRU-i+ Barebone 12 Caddy RAIL
$299.00