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