knoppix std nuked windows?
 

So I thought I'd give Knoppix STD a try because there was no complicated Linux installation. I was playing around, looking to access the windows files (most notably the SAM because of an episode of thebroken :)). So I *finally* figured out that I had to mount the partition. Then I tried to access it from the command line (using aterm, though I don't know the difference). I actually got the wrong one I think, because I went through the desktop, not /mnt (and i believe this was before mounting). But I typed something and it asked me if I reall wanted to make it read only. I said no. Then (after mounting) I found a nice GUI file explorer and found the SAM. I looked at it, tried to mount the floppy drive, forgot the command. Shut down the computer. Later, booted it up, and windows is telling me that I have an unmountable volume. Windows won't start. My question is... can I fix it, or should I try to figure out how to use the CD burner that I think is on my linux CD and just start over?

/rambling plea for help

By the way, I'm not discouraged from linux. Just a little pissed.

Well, honestly, it was a little hard to follow your description of events, but I think I may have an idea what might have happened? Is the windows partition you were accessing NTFS? Because Microsoft won't share the information to do so, Linux cannot reliably write to NTFS. If you tried writing ANYTHING to NTFS, it may have royally screwed up your partition.

P.S. what's a SAM?

The SAM file in the NT Windows systems is what stores the password hashes. Think of it like the pwl files in 98/ME, except the SAM file is encrypted where pwl wasn't.

cant really help with the problem... but i saw that episoded of the broken...
are they ever gonna come out with any new ones?

I don't think I wrote anything to the windows partition. So... It's pretty much fucked? *sigh*

Yeah, I was like shit! shit! shit! plus I had to leave for work. Ah well.

By the sounds of it, you made the drive read/write. As others have said, NTFS doesn't play nicely with others so you probably messed up the drive. I've not heard many good stories of people playing with NTFS and coming out unscathed, but then again I don't look around for those stories =p.

So... even if I read from kinux, I'll probably toast my partition? Or did you mean that I did both? 'cause backing up my data now, k3b (or whatever) works great! It seems faster than Nero/alcohol. If I can access no problem, I might use that instead, whenever I have mass burnings to do.

On another note, Knoppix 3.4 is user friendly and happy. Knoppix 2.7, which came on STD, isn't. It made me a little afraid. :D

EDIT: k3b keeps getting errors. (code 254 -- unknown) Maybe because it has to stream the data from my partition? But the memory buffer seems fine (it displays fine, anyway)

No, Linux can reliably read from NTFS. Its writing that is another story. I dont know what happened to your box, but it looks like something tried to write to it and toasted it.

Oh well. That'll teach me not to touch the command line until I'm on a dedicated HD. And after 5 CDs eaten by k3b... HP Sys recovery on the way. Oh well, it was just ISOs and other warez that I needed. BTW, for when i do get a new HD, what is a good distro to start with? (and how the hell do you configure a wireless card to access the internet?)

Kinda OT, but that's weird... is it really that hard to reverse engineer NTFS or is it an IP issue?

It just seems odd that of all things, linux can't WRITE to NTFS, but it can read it just fine!

Knowing M$, they did their best to make NTFS as ass-backward to decipher so that open source looks less appealing to the average user. Or maybe there's some bs copyright thing that linux actually can't do it.

It's all the permissions in NTFS that Linux has trouble copying, I believe. And mounting an NTFS partition shouldn't be too much of a problem, just make sure you specify "ro" (without the quotes) in your /etc/fstab file to make it read only.

Now, for a great distro to start with, I'm going to recommend SuSE. It's easy, does everything you need, and a great distro for people who are kind of intimidated by Slackware or Debian (which is a great way to learn as well, but can leave most people hating Linux inside of 10 minutes).

Oh, almost forgot. What kind of wireless card are you using? If it's a mainstream card, you shouldn't have <i>that</i> much trouble with it, but I've heard many people complaining about Linux's wireless support.

You know, just for grins, give CHKDSK a shot and see if it can repair the disk. You dont have anything to lose.

oh THAT SAM file. hahaha, I remember that now, back when I used to use l0phtcrack to crack my parents passwords :lol:

You're about 4 hours too late :)

Yep. Now, LC has some thing that comes with it about generating hash tables. Does that actually work, or should I stick with rtgen? I couldn't seem to get it to work, but I only spent like 10 seconds with it.


My wireless card is a netgear 802.11g. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but in Knoppix, I went to set up PPPoe (which looked like the right option) and it couldn't do anything on my card or regular ethernet (which is unplugged). I'll probably have to find out how to make it communicate with my router.

Knoppix might not have had the module loaded by default (I don't know that much about wireless cards with Linux), but if you install a distro that doesn't support it out of the box, I'm sure you can download it from somewhere. Sorry I can't be of much more help than that.

Don't worry about it... I didn't spend more than 5 minutes looking around and playing with the tea timer. Knoppix comes with a tea timer! :lol: