After takin' a swig o' grog, Erik Jan belched out this bit o' wisdom:
>> There's certainly nothing easy about running Windows, except for the
>> ease with which it can be irrecoverably broken.
>
> When I visit them, I take a few CDs with me: MCNLive (Dutch Mandriva
> Live CD)+ empty CDs and an empty DVD; also a CD with the newest programs
> (and updates), like OOo, Firefox and plugins like Noscript and
> Adblockplus, Thunderbird, ZoneAlarm free, AVG antivirus and antispyware,
> Hosts.zip, Hijackthis.exe, Startup.exe, Spywareblaster.exe,
> Spybots&d.exe, Adaware.exe, Irfanview.exe+plugins, Windowsdefender. The
> third CD is PartitionMagic. All this makes a useful tookit to salvage
> data or clean an infected Windows Computer.
I had a rescue disk save my ass today.
My daughter brought back her old laptop from school, the one that went
belly up, the one we replaced with yet another DELL system.
So I take it, stick in a GParted CD, and boot it up. Cool, it seems to
work well. I remove the NTFS partition.
Then my wife walks in, sees me working on it, asks if I fixed it. "Nah,
not yet."
She then says, don't forget to get her pictures off of it.
Gulp.
I'm thinking, what? She told me she got everything months ago!
My ass was, at that point, grass.
So I spent some time googooing. I burn another CD, SystemRescueCD,
boot it, and then use a nice little command-line app called TestDisk to
detect the NTFS partition, and then rebuild the partition table.
My ass was, at that point, saved.
The computer still has a problem in that it sometimes boots badly, with
the annunciator diodes flashing and the system giving off a diagnostic
beep pattern.
But once it boots, it seems to work fine. Might make a nice little
music server for the entertainment center.
Where can I get a Linux Certificate of Authenticity, though?
--
EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people -- lawyers, technologists,
volunteers, and visionaries -- working to protect your digital
rights. -- http://www.eff.org/
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