Knoppix has saved me a ton of worry!

[Xanthus179]

I work for a small computer store, repairing and building systems for small businesses and residential people.

A college student came in this past Thursday with her laptop, telling me how she somehow managed to forget her password to Windows XP. Of course she wanted the use of her laptop back, along with the files that were still on the hard drive.

Well, I could tell that this would be no easy feat as there was no floppy drive on this thing, and you can't install over XP Pro in an attempt to negate the password.

I stumbled across this program called Knoppix after I had wandered into a post on a different website where a guy was complaining about not being able to activate his installation of Windows XP anymore. Someone mentioned that he should try just using Knoppix instead of Windows at all.

Intrigued, I came here and I was immediately in awe. First of all, I have never really used any version of Linux to speak of, but with little effort I was able to get this latest version of Knoppix downloaded and burned to a CD. The best part is that one of the mirrors, Purdue University, is literally a stone throw away from here.

My initial intent was to send the files she wanted saved over the network, but I couldn't immediately figure out how to configure the network properties. On a whim I tried installing an external CD burner we have here. It supposedly only works for Windows, but it was detected without problem, and I was then able to burn a CD of everything she wanted.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I am overjoyed that this program/OS exists. I'm looking forward to reading more about it on this site to see what all it offers.

Thank you all so much!!!

[drdream]

If that hard-drive was NTFS partitioned, i dunno how if you could do something like that

[baldyeti]

A college student came in this past Thursday with her laptop, telling me how she somehow managed to forget her password to Windows XP. Of course she wanted the use of her laptop back, along with the files that were still on the hard drive.

Maybe you can even recover - or at least reset - the password by using
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html
Only try this *after* backing up all important files, though, as there's always
the possibility of damaging the NTFS partition...

[Xanthus179]

Well, since the laptop originally had Win98 on it, she never changed the file system to NTFS, so that wasn't a problem either.

But I guess that I didn't know that Knoppix won't work with NTFS. I'm still reading about it.

[Loper]

...I didn't know that Knoppix won't work with NTFS. I'm still reading about it.

It can read the NTFS filesystem just fine, so saving to a network, CD, or a vFAT or Linux partition is no problem. It's writing NTFS that can cause corruption. Using Partition Image to backup/restore an NTFS partition, while still considered experimental, works for me--it's all just raw sectors anyway, I think...
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-- Michael Rudas
Oak Park Computer Club: http://opcc.2ya.com
Metro Detroit Linux Users' Group: http://www.MDLUG.org
PenguiCon 2.0 Open Source & Science Fiction convention, April 2004: http://www.PenguiCon.org