• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

UsingGRMLForTroubleshootingAndImaging

This page will show you how to use GRML | for troubleshooting and imaging your computer.

GRML is distributed in the form of a live cd. The implication of this is that you can place the cd into your computer's cd-rom drive and boot the computer. This however is dependent on the following factors.

• The cd- / dvd drive should be the first boot device and the computer should be set to boot from this device.
• The cd / dvd should not be corrupted.
• I use the term cd here since as of this writing the GRML distribution is slightly less than 700MB so will fit on a cd. You can also use a DVD for storing the iso file.

I am going to assume that you are using Windows 7.

1. Navigate to the "computer" icon and right click it.
2. See what kind of computer you have namely, is it 32 or 64 bit? You can have a 32 bit operating system running on 64bit hardware. This is a waste though since you cannot utilize all the resources of the computer.

Navigate to http://www.grml.org and choose the "download" link.

1. Choose the correct distribution of gRML you want to download.

Note: I had downloaded the distribution that I thought was for both 32bit and 64bit architectures. When I tried booting from it on a 32bit computer, I was told that I was using an incorrect distribution so download the specific distribution for your system architecture.

1. Once the *.iso file has been downloaded, navigate to it.
2. Right click the file and then write it to a cd.
3. Ensure that your GRML cd is in the drive.
4. Shut down your computer.
5. Start your computer.
6. Keep track of the beeps you here through your pc speaker.
7. You may get one beep just after you reboot signifying the successfull detection of your system hardware. This is something that the bios does.
8. The next single beep will be further along the boot process. You are now at the GRUB prompt.
9. You can hit the enter key to accept the defaults or hit tab once and then type ssh=password where password is a password that you want to assign to this system.
10. After typing the password in the above step, hit the enter key.
11. The cd-rom will swish some more and you will hear a set of ascending tones.
12. You are now at the graphical installer.
13. Hit the letter "q" and then the enter key to exit the installer.
14. You can now try and start speech.
15. For starting software speech, type the following commands.
    modprobe speakup_soft
    espeakup

If using a hardware synthesizer, you follow a similar process except that you do not need the espeakup connector. For example, if you are launching the apollo synthesizer, type

 modprobe speakup_apollo

Ensure that the apollo synthesizer is switched on. You will be told that the apollo has been found and you will hear the apollo talking.

You now have a functioning Linux system. Be warned, you will be unable to save any changes you make since the system is purely running from memory.

Listing things

The "ls" command is used to list directories and files. There are several parameters that can be specified on the commandline to customize the output of the ls command.

Various troubleshooting tasks

Getting data about PCI devices

Use the lspci command to list all pci devices.

Seeing what network interfaces are present

ifconfig -a warning: This command can output a lot of information.

Querying your network card for its capabilities

ethtool ETH0 -S where eth0 is the name of the interface you want information for.you can pipe this to a file to save to disk.

Finding what drives are attached

ls /mnt The above command will give you a list of devices that can be mounted. Most IDE drives show as SCSI and are labeled as /sda, /sdb etc. The partitions on the drives are nu,mbered so to access the first partition on the first drive, you would need to access /sda1. If you need to list only the hard drives, then try the following command. ls /mnt/sda*

Mounting drives

You need to mount a drive before you can write to it. In the case of windows drives, these are usually formatted as NTFS. To mount a NTFS drive, you need to issue the following command. Note: I assume that you want to mount sdc1 which is a USB drive. mount.ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1

If you are returned to the shell, the drive has been mounted successfully. If not, you will get an error message. From GRML version 11, you also see a list of volume labels instead of just sda, sdb etc. So, you can issue a command like mount.ntfs-3g /dev/datastore /mnt/datastore.