Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Boot Knoppix

Hacks 1–11

Throughout this book, Knoppix is described as the Swiss Army knife for system troubleshooting and repair. Like a Swiss Army knife, Knoppix has many handy tools, both general-purpose (like a knife or a screwdriver) and special-purpose (like a corkscrew). Some of these tools are used for specific repairs, while others are used for routine maintenance.

You should not use a Swiss Army knife for the first time when you are locked in a room with a bomb that is just seconds away from exploding—we can’t all be MacGyver. Likewise, you should familiarize yourself with Knoppix before you use it to attempt to rescue your sick notebook that you never backed up or the company’s failed accounting server. This chapter starts you on the path to Knoppix mastery by beginning at the beginning: booting Knoppix. By using the cheat codes and boot time options covered in this chapter, you should be able to get Knoppix to boot on almost any x86 computer.

The first hacks in this chapter highlight the basics for obtaining the latest version of Knoppix and getting to the boot: prompt. All new computers support booting from an optical (CD or DVD) drive, and many computers attempt to boot directly from a CD rather than from the hard drives on the system. In case your computer doesn’t support booting directly from a CD, I have included instructions for booting Knoppix from a floppy disk and from the network.

The second part of this chapter covers cheat codes—options you pass at ...