I have a very strange questions, i was browsing one of my friend hard drive using knoppix live CD, i was amazed to find that all the folder which he uses was empty, there was no files present in them, for example there was a folder in /usr/local named web, but when i browsed that folder using knoppix it was empty.I searched for files in every partition but still no result found.

After some time when i placed hard disk back and booted the PC normally, everything was in its proper place. Then i thought to make image of the hard drive and use it on my PC, the image booted well, but still those particular files were missing.

I want to know how is that possible??
Is there any way to get files from the remote system during bootup??
How can i get those files???

Thanks in advance..

They were probably on a different partition or hard drive.

no,i checked them every where, but still not able to find...

the only difference when i booted the image into my PC was that my PC was not connected to net(irrespective of other hardware differences).

Have you looked at the /etc/fstab file. It will show if /usr/local is being mounted from another partition/drive.

ya i have checked, every partition and no other drive is present in his system..

When you boot up from a Live CD, you would normally have to manually mount any partition on the internal hard drive before you could see the contents.

Boot up from the Live CD and run "fdisk -l" to confirm how the LiveCD system is seeing things. Then mount one of the partitions and see if you can read it.

i did that before.I mounted all the partitions available and searched for file using find command.Still no result found.

My hunch is that some key piece of information is being omitted here---all I can suggest is to give a complete description of the system and post the results of "fdisk -l", the commands used to mount the partitions, and the results of "ls -al", etc.

forget the "find" command---if "ls -al" shows nothing, then "find" won't see anything.