If a Windows machine has a CD burner and the hard drive looks like it is about to fail, or the Operating system is so trashed you have to reinstall; you can back up customer data using a Knoppix bootable CD.  Make any changes necessary to the BIOS to boot from a CD.  Insert the Knoppix CD and boot.  The Knoppix CD will first present a “Boot” menu screen with the word “boot:” in the lower left part of the screen.  Press ENTER and the Linux OS on the CD will boot.  This Linux distribution is completely CD based, and will not write anything to the hard drive.

Once Knoppix has finished loading, close the browser window that automatically opens.  Look at the desktop icons labeled “hd##” where ## is a letter and a number.  Hda1 is the first hard drive partition on the first IDE channel.  Hda2 is the second usable partition on the first IDE channel, etc., etc.  A quirk of the Knoppix CD burning software is that it will not see any hard drive data until that hard drive partition has first been browsed to using the desk top icons.  You also will not know which partition to copy from (unless there is only one) until you browse them to see what is on them.

After browsing to, and identifying the right partition of burn the CD from, you need to start the Knoppix CD burning program, called k3b.  You can either start it from a shell (click on the shell icon on the task bar) and type k3b.  Or click on the big “K,” which is the Knoppix version of Windows start button, then “System,” then “K3b.”  Don’t bother changing the K3b setup from this menu, since no changes can be saved.

Once K3b has started, click on “New Project,” then “New Data Project” buttons in the upper left of the screen.  You should get a two-part screen with the computer drives and data at the top and the blank CD project at the bottom.  If there is a third section that looks like something for playing audio, close it with the little x in the upper right corner of that section.  The upper section of the screen is divided into two columns, with mounted folders or drives on the left, and their detail contents on the right.

If the proper hard drive partition has been browsed to as described above, click on the mount point labeled “Root” to expand it.  Scroll down to “mnt” and click on it to see all mounted drives.  Scroll down to the partition that you identified by your browsing as the one to backup from, and click on it (the name).  After the partition has been recognized as one that has been previously browsed, you will see detail on the right and a plus sign beside the partition name to expand the tree further. 

If you want an entire folder, select the parent folder on the left, so the folder name appears on the right.  Right-click on the folder name on the right, and select “Add to Project” from the pop-up menu.  You will see the folder appear in the bottom half of the screen, and a colored progress bar on the very bottom of the screen to show how full your CD is getting.  Continue adding files and/or folders until you have all you want, or the CD is full.

Click on the “Burn” button at the top of the screen.  This brings up a window with four tabs at the top of it.  On the first tab, set the burn speed – the default is 1x.  On the “Volume Desc” tab, set the Volume Name, without spaces.  This name will show in Windows Explorer as the name of the CD in the CD-ROM drive.  If you are NOT using a CD-RW disc, then make no changes to the “Settings” tab.  If you are using a CD-RW (and why would you do something that dumb?), then change the Multi-session selection to “Start multi-session.”  On the “Advanced” tab, check the top option “Allow untranslated filenames.”  Make sure a blank CD is in the drive, and click on the “Write” button.   A small dialog box will pop up for a moment while the system confirms that a blank CD disc is in the drive, and then the burn process will start.

When the burn is complete, the CD tray will open to eject the completed CD.  The Windows data is backed up without Windows, and the customer thinks you are a hero!