h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My brother has handed me his laptop saying that its not booting, just giving an error message("Insert system disk in drive"). Sticking knoppix in and eventully getting to chose boot device (takes a while for it to show device, dvd/cd drive bit iffy so only booted to knoppix once ). On loading no hdds are shown, trying fdisk and cfdisk it gives errors when trying the obvious names for hdds. Nothing shows up for hdd in /proc, the only item present is the dvd/cdrom.


So is the diagnosis that the harddisk of the laptop is dead a resonable suggestion, and would you be willing to take a look at it to confirm this?


Having told him that its dead my dad asked him if it had been showing anysigns previously, to which the reply came that it sometimes happened and he just hit ctrl alt delete and then it worked.

It depends what Knoppix you tried to start it with; if it was one of the "Live image" releases, they deliberately disable HDD access!

Tell your dad to swing by with it some time and I'll have a look. Not Tuesday morning, though, as the gas man cometh.

Its a live cd(Knoppix 3.6, that i downloaded last year i think), I have however in the passed used the same disk to recover my main pc and it gave easy access to the data on the hdd. Also in about 3 steps was able to edit the data on the hdd.

1st time was data revocery when i messed up a bootloader i just backed up everything and started from scratch, 2nd time was changing permissions on a file in linux that i had changed previous to the restart and then it refused to boot.


I'll let him know.

I tried to use a recent Knoppix "Live image" to CFDISK a PC a week or so ago, and found out that I couldn't. I had to download something like four other distributions till I found one that would do it. (I needed to create a swap partition before SuSE 10 would install...)

Hmm, well even though I know this disk allows me editing on my main pc. I jsut tried it on my dads laptop for experimentations sake, and it didn't show the hdd. So I have to say the knoppix use means nothing.

Is the disabling on hdd support in the new ones to prevent people causing damage and such things?

Part of the advertising of the "Live image" discs is the promise that you can run them with no danger to your HDD; they disable the access to guarantee that.

I found it quite good that knoppix in my main pc gave me hdd access (readonly) with no work, then with a little that a novice couldn't do rw access. If that no longer exists then its not much of a useful tool anymore.

It's only the "Live image" discs that are crippled like that. They *will* access an existing Linux filesystem read-only (r/w for the swapfile) but in theory nothing else. You can, however, download single-disc "recovery" distributions that will let you read and write the HDD, plus they have lots of recovery tools as standard. It's just a case of finding them, and they're rarely the latest kernel.

Well I jsut booted my knoppix[3.6] disc to my main machine, which describes itself as a live cd. As standard it dosn't allowed me to cfdisk /dev/hda. I then followed 4 steps from memory, and cfdisk /dev/hda works.

Fairy nuff.

Your dad just brought it round; by putting the HDD into his machine we confirmed it wasn't spinning up, and is thus dead. He's nipped round the corner to get a new 30MB unit, if they have one in stock...