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Oh my oh my ... another Windows screw-up, and Linux saves the day ...

  • Subject: Oh my oh my ... another Windows screw-up, and Linux saves the day ...
  • From: Richard Rasker <spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:09:05 +0100
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Organization: Linetec
  • User-agent: KNode/0.10.9
  • Xref: ellandroad.demon.co.uk comp.os.linux.advocacy:733243

Being a college teacher, my spouse has to mark students' tests.

In this particular case, the test was a 'digital paper' -- i.e. students had
to do the test on a college Windows computer running XP, and save it on a
3.5" diskette. So far, so good, and some 70 students took the test.

Only afterwards, it turned out that some 90% of diskettes handed in were
b0rk3d -- at least where Windows was concerned. Most of the time, Windows
just came up with an error message saying "Non-Formatted Disk"; sometimes,
the actual .doc file was recognized, but then MS Word (or Windows) would
choke and freeze. In all, it was Not a Pretty Sight.

What to do? Ah well ... drop the rogue 3.5"'s in a Linux box, and see what
can be done ... and sure enough, some 65 of those "unreadable" floppies
could be mounted and read on my trusty old (and actually retired) Acer
TravelMate 515TE laptop running Mandriva 2008.0 (as it happened to be the
only machine in the house with a functional 3.5" drive).

>From all those "unreadable" (in Windows) disks, I could restore some 55
documents perfectly, and another four mostly, all thanks to Linux, NOT
Windows. Only three documents were lost permanently.

Windows: It's a shame that crap like that can be SO popular ..

Richard Rasker
-- 
http://www.linetec.nl

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