Back Online
Well, that was a struggle and a half.
It seems that my SATA drive had problems. I had four partitions on that drive, including my documents and one set aside for the windows SWAP file. No wonder I had issues.
What I've done is wipe out my Linux installation (which was on the IDE drive with the Win XP system) to make room for copies of the data from the damaged drive. That didn't work until I found a utility on a boot disk that would find files and allow me to copy them to another partition (and I found that by a fluke). Trouble with that solution was that I lost my net access for a while as I copied things over - I had no e-mail client and other things wouldn't work, though while I still had the Linux install I still had Firefox.
Backing up now while I decide what to do to the SATA drive. Looks like I recovered 98% of the lost files, including some I deleted back in February of this year! Better more than less. If I replace the drive, I think I will do a new install of Linux on part of it.
Only question is, which Distro? Suggestions (and reasons why) please.
