-----Original Message----- From: Leo Mauler
--- Brian Kelsay Brian.Kelsay@kcc.usda.gov wrote:
Define "real rescue disk". If your drive is fubared and swap part. is damaged, then it won't mount it.
Does it really have that level of detection? I'd think it doesn't, and that undetected physical damage is going to cause problems when it tries to mount the swap partition in the physically damaged section of the hard drive.
Yes, this is the most likely outcome. Knoppix detects a swap partition, tries to mount it and either fails or locks up. If it merely fails and goes on, life is good and Knoppix can be used to fix the machine, or attempt to. If it locks up then one would have to reboot and do the "noswap" option. Whereas a liveCD made specifically for this type of task would only try to launch a bare minimum of software. If all you want to do is check the hdd, then Knoppix is really a Rube-Goldberg machine. Sure it has all the tools and bells and whistles, but all you really need is a command line and a scandisk tool (and possibly cfdisk and mkfs). And if a person is not knowledgeable enough to do some disk analysis from the command line, then that person has absolutely no business trying to fix a broken system.