How Knoppix saved my life (or my wife)

It was the day of 13th Sept 2006 when my wife's laptop got infected by a backdoor virus and once she restarted her PC after running Norton, it just didn't boot up. Attempted 100 times but failed in all the possible modes. She contacted me and I asked her to check for a bootable CD and check norton's CD again for any DOS based tool but there was not DOS tool available with Norton so this attempted too failed. I reached home and tried some other anti-virus tools but nothing worked for me.

In the middle of the night, I suddenly recalled one software which said that it could work direct from the DVD and that was Knoppix (www.knoppix.net) and I remembered the name so it wasn't difficult for me to get that CD which was supplied by an IT Magazine.

The journey begins

I restarted my PC, inserted Knoppix DVD and bang......linux started and I was almost stunned to see linux evolution as I'd always been following that since 1993 but hardly used it bcoz of the platform constraints in my programming adventure. I evaluated Biodrive also which has 1GB storage out of which 512 is free and rest has the KDE, browsers, IMs etc but it was the first time I was using this to actually save me from the worst scenario of losing the entire data.
Before proceeding, I just wanted to take the backup of my data and I connected my external hard disk and wow.....knoppix detected that in one shot and I checked the crucial data on laptop's hard disk and it was there so the next step was to copy all the crucial data to the external USB drive and I copied the stuff from laptop's hdd and tried to copy that to the external drive but it failed to copy. Just few clicks and I found out Actions->Make this drive writable and I knew this was the reason and I just switched it on and it was fairly easy operation and the data was successfully stored in the external drive except one folder and I had the space constraint as my external hard disk of 80GB was almost full except the first partition of that but while trying to make it writable, it failed saying that the partition was NTFS and knoppix wouldn't do that diastrous thing of writing on that so I accepted knoppix's apology and copied the external hdd data on the other laptop's hdd and made some room. After successfully increasing the size, I attached it back on the infected laptop and took the rest of the backup and I was least concenred about the rest.

Conclusion

It was a great ride where knoppix did everything it could do to save my wife's crucial data (let me tell you that she's running many crucial projects and each and every file was important), there were some possibilities of diskchecking etc in knoppix but I didn't want those but before turning it off, I wanted to explore my favorite things like browser, games (it has a huge set of that) and graphics software (specially GIMP) and all these were simply amazing. I turned off the knoppix and while turning it off, it opened the dvd tray and asked me to remove knoppix dvd and close the tray again and I did it....ending my journey to the altogether different experience of not needing to install the OS on the HDD and still use that to the full potential, hats off to Knoppix. I reset my wife's laptop to the facotry setting  and restored all the data.

You can check nore about knoppix at http://knopper.net/knoppix-info/index-en.html