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Trinity Rescue Kit: Usage Howto

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1. Scripts to help you

-mountallfs.sh (broken now) mounts all possible partitions on all possible disks. The mount points are equal to the device special file, so if you have a filesystem on /dev/hda1, it will create a directory /hda1 and mount it there. This script will give you numerous error messages, because there is no way to know beforehand if a filesystem exists on a partition. I haven 't been able to pipe it yet to /dev/null (the mount command must use something else than stderr or stdout). Also beware that Windows 2000 NTFS partitions (NTFS 5) get mounted as read-only. See further in this document how to mount them read/write.
Verify what is mounted by typing "mount"

-virusscan.sh uses the free Linux antivirus version of F-prot (from Frisk software). It attempts to get the latest updates at ftp.f-prot.com, unpacks it and scans all local disks. Off course, you first need networking support and local filesystems mounted.
F-prot has a weird license which permits you to use it for free for home use until a new version appears. It 's definitely  not GPL, so I 'm considering a TRK version without f-prot, just to avoid license problems

-/floppy/trkscripts is not actually a script, but you can make it one. TRK 1.0 has a lilo option that triggers mounting your floppy drive (on /dev/fd0) and search for the file "trkscripts" to execute. It executes in the current startup shell, so you can give it system wide variables. Somebody had asked me to implement this feature but from the computers' harddisk so one could launch computer specific maintenance. It was a great idea, except you would have to be certain you could mount any computers disk automatically (cfr. SCSI modules that don 't load in kudzu). A floppy is such a universal device that it will almost always work.

2. Changing NT/Win2k passwords

This is quite tricky, you cannot miss any of these steps or you 'll end up with a pooched filesystem!
I'm also not responsable for any damage you may suffer from this procedure. It has worked for me so far, but I can 't give any guarantees. Use it as a last resort

-After mounting all partitions with "mountallfs.sh", your NTFS partitions will be mounted read-only. To have it mounted read/write, type "mount -o remount,rw /yourntfsmountpoint".

-You need some free space on another non NTFS partition, because editing on NTFS is very dangerous and it won 't work anyway to make changes to your SAM. You can create a new ramdisk (default size of 16Mb) by typing "mke2fs /dev/ram1", make a mount point, say f.i. /ram, "mkdir /ram" and mount it there "mount /dev/ram1 /ram.
There! A nice ramdisk to copy your files into (you need enough RAM off course)

-Copy your SAM, system and SECURITY file to another filesystem (fat or ext2). These files are located in WINNT/system32/config/

-Go to the dir you just copied your files to

-Type "chntpw SAM system SECURITY" or just "chntpw" to see a help screen

-Follow instructions

-Copy SAM, system and SECURITY back to their original location

-Unmount the ntfs partition

-Very important! Run ntfsfix of the partition you just unmounted! If it was /hda1, do ntfsfix /dev/hda1. Ntfsfix does some repairs like emptying your LOG file and setting the chkdsk flag. Let checkdisk run when you reboot into NT/Win2K

-Your Windows should boot after checkdisk, with the new password in place.

3. Known bugs

-difficult procedure to change NT passwords, will make scripts for them
-mountallfs.sh script broken after devfs implementation. I 'll make a better script for future version that tries to find out there 's a filesystem on a partition before attempting to mount it.
-partimage client works, partimaged server doesn't: /usr/etc/partimagedusers has wrong file ownership but crashes afterwards anyway with a segmentation fault. I have recompiled it and this works. Fixed in next version. You can compile it yourself of course on your server if you like.

4. Future features

-maybe X-windows, but I don 't see the use. Some people have asked it. I might consider -as a new project- adapting a complete installation from disk to cd with a minimal window manager using framebuffering. A Debian would do better here.
-Some sort of hardware test software, although the Linux kernel itself is already a good test
-firewall support
-The current version of kudzu doesn 't detect my USB Silicom network card, nor does it detect any PCMCIA devices since it has no support for it yet. The latest version, 0.99-97 supports it but requires GLIBC_2.3, which Mandrake 9.0 doesn 't support yet. Next version of TRK will be built on Mandrake 9.1 which will have GLIBC_2.3. To manually enable PCMCIA/cardbus support, do "modprobe pcmcia_core" and then "modprobe serial_cs". Next you can run "cardmgr" and if that didn 't detect your networkcard yet, you might have to insmod it manually. But it works. Manually...
-The Silicom U2E USB Ethernet adapter works by modprobing kaweth ("modprobe kaweth")
-A TRK Forum on this site

5. Screenshots

-Lilo boot splash screen
-Kernel and init startup output
-Fancy login logo
-Miscellaneous output: running processes, disk usage, loaded modules, ip configuration

6. Contact the author

Contact me, Tom Kerremans aka harakiri at
I 'd like to know what you think of it.

7. previous versions

TRK 0.3 HOWTO
TRK 0.4 HOWTO
TRK 0.4 Development HOWTO
TRK 0.5 HOWTO
TRK 1.0 HOWTO