Tux Can Give Windows a Helping Hand with Knoppix

As you faithful Enterprise Networking Planet readers know, Knoppix is a great all-purpose rescue CD for both Linux and Windows. A few months ago you read about using Knoppix to run a virus-scanner on Windows machines. The advantages of this are getting the most current virus definitions, running the scan from a guaranteed clean disk, memory-resident nasties are not present, and it’s free of cost. However, it has one major downside — Linux support for writing to NTFS filesystems is not reliable. It’s hard to say what percentage of Windows systems use NTFS, which is used by Windows NT/2000/XP, but it’s sizable, so having full read/write access from outside Windows is essential.