Where to download Knoppix 3.1

I have misplaced my copy of 3.1 and desperately need it for some data recovery. Where can I get hold of another copy of version 3.1?

TIA

There were actually a lot of different versions of 3.1, at the time Klaus was doing nearly daily releases of Knoppix and not changing the version number. So if you really believe that you need 3.1 than I would suggest that you try to determine which version you need and be more specific.

The question that I have is do you really need 3.1? I expect that I could actually find a copy of some of the original ISOs and make one of them available to you in some way. But if you just want it for "data recovery" then it isn't clear (at least to me) why you need 3.1 rather than any version of knoppix since then and I'm not inclined to do that extra work if there is no valid reason for wanting 3.1. So if searching for it is failing (assuming that you even bothered to do a search) then please explain in more detail why you need such an old version. While I would be glad to see an archive of all versions of Knoppix, I don't know of any. And I'm glad to not have people posting here that they just found Knoppix 3.1 on a website, downloaded and booted it, and then start asking about all sort of known and resolved problems with the early release.

Warning: If I do find an ISO of 3.1 it will likely be an early one and will omit many of the later bug fixes and enhancements of later versions of 3.1. So be careful what you ask for.

For someone who "desperately needs this" you response is somewhat slow. While I was waiting I looked a little. I think that I still could find a 3.1 ISO, but the computer that I was using in the 3.1 days is currently refusing to power up. It would take some work to search the old IDE hard drives and see if an ISO is out there. and, as already stated, I don't understand why you would need 3.1 for data recovery.

Alternately, I can offer an ISO of the 4.0.2 CD EN ISO. In my opinion this was a much better Knoppix release than any of the 3.x releases and in many ways better than the 5.x releases. And, on a selfish side, that would take far less work to make available to you than 3.1.

I still can't imagine any valid reason for using 3.1 or even 4.0.2 for data recovery (although I'll acknowledge that I could be overlooking something), but please respond in this thread to let me know what you want.

Hi, sorry for late reply. I posted this yesterday, but finished work before you answered, I do appreciate your help though. The reason I "need" version 3.1 is because it has, in the past, been able to read and recover data from a failing hard drive when the failing hard drive causes Windows Explorer to freeze, go grey, and say "not responding" until you unplug the bad drive. This also happens with Hirens Boot CD and UBCD4Win. I'm not sure if any other versions of Knoppix would be capable, but I know the 3.1 version I had was very good at it. I have tried with version 6.2 of Knoppix and that acts like Windows Explorer et al, ie it cannot read the drive - it doesn't actually freeze up, but does give an error, after taking absolutely ages (eg 10 mintues, for the drive to show up in the list of drives at all). I would gladly try the version 4.0.2 that you suggest. If that fails and you could possibly get me version 3.1 I would be happy to pay you for your efforts. Thanks very much in advance. BTW - I'm in England so I think we are about 5 hours ahead of you. PS - I have no idea why 3.1 has worked so well in the past, I just discovered this wonderful ability of 3.1 by chance and like a complete noob didn't make a backup copy of the disc.

Also, I have no idea which version of 3.1 I had, as I no longer have it, if you see what I mean

Yes, I have searched Google, and also the list of mirrors on knopper.net, but can't find any older ones. Knopper only seems to link to version 7. I have also looked on filehippo, oldware.org, oldversion.com. It seems that this is a little too "geeky" for those sorts of sites, so I was hoping that a specialist site like this would be able to tell me how dumb I was being and provide a link to some sort of download archive. I can't find a valid download on torrentz.eu or bitsoup.me either.

Also, all my messages wait for mod approval before going live on here...so sorry if it seems I'm not paying attention. I really do appreciate any help you would be kind enough to give. Thanks

OK. I still don't really think that there is any advantage of 3.1 over 4.0.2 or really any other Linux live CD out there for data recovery, but you sound like if you have problems with anything other than 3.1 you'll believe in your heart that the problem is that it isn't 3.1. I can understand that on some hardware you will need a CD rather than the DVD versions currently available. And, as previously stated, I was happier with 4.0.2 than 5.x or 6.x so I stayed on that a long time and really don't know if there were some problem that would keep 5 or 6 from recovering data when the early versions could, but it seems unlikely and if it were it should have been a topic of discussion here that I would have seen.

Also, don't worry about your messages needing mod approval. I'm one of the people who does that approval, so I'll see it as soon as I get back on weather it is approved or not (I actually approved your first message before I responded to it, your other responses were approved by someone else before I saw them). So there is never any waiting for approval to reach the core group of people that are most likely to be able to help you.

Since you still seem to feel that 3.1 is what you need, I'll intensify my search for an old 3.1 ISO and not bother with the 4.0.2 ISO that I have on my network. Check back whenever you can and look for a further response from me (or anyone else who can help). If I completely fail in finding a 3.1 ISO I'll post back what the oldest I've found is (there were 3.2 ISOs all the way to 3.6 if I remember right before 4.0.2, but the oldest that I have handy is the 4.0.2).

Good news and bad news.

The good news is that i have found several copies of Knoppix 3.1. One is labeled as the 12-08-EN version and the other two are likely from the same ISO or just days away (not even sure what year that was).

The bad news is that these are burnt images, not the original ISO file. I'm pretty sure that I still have the original ISO file around somewhere, and will continue to look for it. I don't want to try sending out "an ISO made from a burnt CD made from an ISO" if that can be avoided, and I'm still recovering from having to reload Windows on my two main computers in the last month and so don't yet have the tools back in place to make such an ISO anyway.

I'm really writing back to try to confirm my suspicion that you are not in the U.S.A. Several things in your posts lead me to believe that. But if you were in the USA I could even send you one of these already made CDs, or for all I know you might be local and I could hand it to you. But I don't really want to deal with the absurd costs of U.S. international postal shipping, and you likely don't want to put up with the delays of international mail. Assuming that you are not in the U.S.A. I'm continuing my quest for one of the original ISO files.

If you want to get any personal information to me (such as a U.S.A. address) please protect your privacy by using the sites Private Message feature rather than posting that information in this thread.

An ISO has been found.

I'm currently uploading KNOPPIX_V3.1-12-08-2002-EN.iso to my public folder on Dropbox. Once that upload completes (and my upload speed isn't all that good) I will send you a public link to it through the site's Private Message system. Check to see if you have a Private Message to get the link.

This is absolutely one of the earliest public Knoppix releases that there was. Klaus has made a lot of improvements and bug fixes since then. I don't want to post the link publicly for two reasons. 1) It is to my personal Dropbox account. While it should be secure, I don't know how secure a Dropbox account is and I would rather not have the link posted publicly. Please do not repost or share the link. 2) There should be no reason to use this version, and I would hate for novices to burn this thinking it had anything to do with modern Knoppix. But if anyone else is following this thread while the discussion is going on (Today is June 20 2015) and you want to grab a copy of this for nostalgia purposes, let me know and I'll PM you the link. If you come across this later and you want the link, sorry, but on-line Dropbox space is limited and I'll likely be deleting it soon after the OP confirms that he has downloaded it.

This, of course, is an ISO file. I don't know how you got your original Knoppix 3.1 CD but I'll just repeat the mantra, This must be burnt as an "Image" or "ISO", not just copied to the CD. And it really really should be burnt at low speed. If you don't burn it at low speed or don't know what burning it as an image means and just copy it to the disc, consider the advice of the great philosophers Nelson and Mr. T.

I just have the ISO. I don't have the release notes, or any other support files including the md5 file, beyond what is on the CD. Be grateful for even getting this. I'll run an MD5 of the ISO that I have and either post the results or send it with the link, that's the best that I can do.

WARNING: No matter what your religious beliefs about writing to an NTFS partition with the current Knoppix are, this is an extremely early Knoppix and it must not be used to write to an NTFS partition. You likely could not even force it to write to NTFS, but if you manage to you will corrupt the partition, although the corruption may not be apparent immediately. You can use it to recover from NTFS or FAT (including FAT32) partitions, but only write the recovered files to FAT or FAT32 partitions, or send them to another machine across the network. And don't write to ANY NTFS partition that you are trying to recover from, even to delete junk.

Please let me know when you have the download from the provided link so that I can recover my Dropbox space. If I don't hear back from you within the next week I'll just curse you and delete it anyway.

The upload is still going on, I'll get on with my life and check it later to send the link.

The upload has completed. I have sent a PM to the original poster so that he get can get the file. If anyone else wants it please let me know and I'll sent you the link by PM as well. Be aware this is a VERY VERY OLD version of Knoppix.

I calculate the MD5 checksum to be 3005a2c18b9f0fa315c797cb5c58bb59 .
Please do not burn the image if you don't get the same checksum, rather contact me and I'll download the image (or have someone else download it) and determine if the problem occurred with your download or my upload of the original file.

The file will be up for a week or so but no longer unless I'm waiting for stragglers to confirm getting their downloads.

No one other than the original poster seems to want this old version. I rather expect that at least a few people would want a copy, if only for the novelty and to compare it to current versions. If anyone does want it, you have a couple of days to request it, then I'll take it down this weekend.