I had some troubles on my gentoo box that were preventing it from fully booting up. KNOPPIX was a great solution. It allowed me to boot into a fully-functional linux system regardless of the state of the operating system on the hard drive. From there, I was able to pinpoint my problems. Try it out, highly recommended!
Read on for the details…
For some reason I thought I’d try ReiserFS for the main partition on my gentoo box. No complaints after a couple years of use, until today: looks like I’ve got some corruption.
In its defense, the partition is BIG and nearly FULL. And it doesn’t appear to be anything a standard fsck (“File System ChecK”) can’t fix. Easy, right?
You should not run fsck on a mounted (active) partition. So, to fix your main partition, the most obvious solution is to run fsck on the next boot (before the partition is mounted). The easiest way to do that is to use the [-F] option of shutdown:
Alas, that does not work for ReiserFS. So, the next simplest solution: boot from a live CD – they typically won’t mount your hard drive if you don’t ask them to. After considering most of the more popular choices, KNOPPIX sounded good. Downloaded it in 10 minutes, fired it up in 3 minutes, and kicked off the reiser version of fsck:
Hrmm… no errors! Well, a little googling in a different direction led me to this… user error! I forgot to run etc-update, and gentoo was NOT happy. As dog trainers have often taught us, “BAD OWNER!!”
So the moral of the story is… if you’re looking for a way to show off linux, carry spare CD’s of KNOPPIX in your pocket, stuff them in any random PC’s you find, and hit the reset button. :>
