A sanity check for 'persistent store' on Knoppix from Flash

[kl522]

I occasionally crash my 2Gb SD Chip Knoppix 6.2.1 installation doing things
beyond my competence. Knoppix gives one root privileges that one may not
always deserve.

I can share your frustration from a user perspective.

You have presented your 'hypothesis' of the knoppix persistent image extended beyond it's provided space. Untill now, that remains as a hypothsis, as I mentioned earlier, both knoppix compressed image and knoppix persistent image are "hard sized", should not grow beyond their provided space, in theory. If they at all do that, it is a very serious lower level bug.

What you may not quite realize is that, in the other discussion thread, it has been discussed and established, it's possible to crash knoppix by growing the knoppix persistent image just to it's maximum size, leaving it un-fit for the next boot. I offer you an easy way to repeat this yourself :-

# cd /KNOPPIX-DATA
# dd if=/dev/zero of=x

Upon shutdown and reboot, you will notice that knoppix will hit a total failure to boot. And I did offer a possible way that one can recover from this, ie boot by adding 'debug' cheatcode to syslinux.cfg ( since the system already cannot boot, you will have to take the flash to another computer to do this ). And I did mention also that, it would be nice if knoppix during the booting, perform a small little sanity check, it would be able to avoid such a disastrous total failure to boot. And it's a simple modification, to the author of KNOPPIX.

If however, you are remain convinced that the crash you encounter is the first type, please post a consistent way where you could crash it that way. Then it will be useful to establish the root cause of the problem.

Cheers.