New to using Knoppix need some assitance!

[kidraven04]

I have a toshiba laptop running windows xp home ed. with an intel celeron M cpu 420 @ 1.60GHz, 1024 KB cache, and running 2GB of ddr2 ram. It has recently crashed and some one told me to try a knoppix cd to try and recover the drive to boot into windows. I have tried to recover the drive with a system restore cd but I am unable to do so because the admin password has some how enabled itself with me the user ever setting one to begin with. So far I have burned an image to cd of ADRIANE-KNOPPIX_V6.2.1CD-2010-01-31-EN. When I had started the laptop with the newly burned knoppix cd the laptop had trouble reading the cd until after a couple of times it finaly recognized the cd and it booted. It ran fine for a moment and got an input/output error. Dont know really how to handle this program and I am new to using knoppix if someone suggest a fix thanks.

[Harry Kuhman]

Oh, so many issues in one place. I'm not sure what someone told you, or why you no longer seem to want to talk to someone, but Knoppix isn't going to make any change to that drive that would defeat a password. And even if it could, writing to a NTFS partition with Knoppix is only likely to cause more problems. What Knoppix can do is help you recover files that you might want but couldn't be bothered to back up before the inevitable Windows failure happened. You can transfer the files to another computer on a network, or copy them to a FAT formatted USB drive. With some older versions you could also burn them to disc, but that option has been made much harder in recent versions.

Once you have backups you should reinstall Windows (if you still want Windows) from the original discs or the backup discs. If you don't have them Knoppix cannot help.

You likely don't want the ADRIANE version of Knoppix, which was built for sight impaired people. Sighted people can of course use it too, but most users prefer the vesrions with ADRIANE in the name.

See the documentation link near the top of the page and read the wiki for more information about recovering data from the disc.

[kidraven04]

Thanks for the advice i am going to try another way with hirens.boot.cd I will reply again when issue is resolved

[krishna.murphy]

Thank goodness for that admin password! It prevented loss of all important data on your system, as "Restore" is anything but safe for your files. Hiren's is useful at times, but it can get you in deeper trouble, too.

I suggest you test the CD by typing (at the big penguin boot prompt):

knoppix testcd

If there is an error, you should probably just start over - download a non-Adriane version via BitTorrent from the list at: http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/, burn it at SLOW speed, then test THAT. After a CD verifies as correct (or if it was correct to start with), try booting with:

knoppix

and you should be able to back up your important personally-created files (and downloaded stuff you want to keep) to a flash drive, a network share, or CD/DVD (using the Brasero program from Main menu-> Sound & Video).

Cheers!
Krishna