Hooray Ubuntu
For the cost of a blank CD, I just retrieved the last 3 years of my life:)
If you haven't heard me grumble about it - I had a fairly catastrophic computer failure shortly before Christmas. I'd already been having some power issues, but I suddenly started getting BSoD on startup. I poked around a bit and diagnostics pretty much confirmed a corrupt boot sector. So much for my December budget, but there wasn't really another option so I ordered a new laptop.
We do have a backup drive, but like most people I'm fairly lazy about backup, and hadn't done one in 2-3 months. Since I'd written a story and updated quite a few ongoing files in that time, I decided to try and get data straight off the old drive. First attempt was to just buy a drive enclosure and try to retrieve it via USB. No go - I still don't know why it failed because it could at least partially see the drive, but I tried a couple of different kinds of USB solutions and wasn't able to get at any files. Next, I attempted UBCD for Windows - until I realized that every copy of Windows in our house is from Dell, and the 'fix' for Dell CDs didn't work for the versions we own.
Finally, after 2 failures trying to build the UBCD for Windows ISO earlier today, I decided that I could live without 2 months of data, so I plugged in our backup drive to retrieve my files and it promptly failed...
At this point I started poking into online forums for possible solutions. Wading through 10 tons of crap, I finally found a somewhat useful suggestion. Using a demo version of RStudio Emergency Startup CD, I was at least able to confirm that the files were still accessible on the old drive - which I had been assuming, but wasn't positive.
The RStudio software looks interesting, and for different types of drive failures might be worth the money. However, being as cheap as I am, I really didn't want to pay $80 for their software to actually retrieve the files, so I kept digging.
Lo and behold, I found an article that reminded me that if I boot to Linux on a CD I could grab all my files for nothing:) Feeling incredibly stupid for not trying this a week ago, I got a copy of Ubuntu Live (I'm not actually really familiar with Ubuntu, but the article had a link straight to it) and I was good to go.
And the moral of the story is, even if you're like me and stuck using Windows 95% of the time, don't forget the ways Linux can still save your tail (for free).
If you haven't heard me grumble about it - I had a fairly catastrophic computer failure shortly before Christmas. I'd already been having some power issues, but I suddenly started getting BSoD on startup. I poked around a bit and diagnostics pretty much confirmed a corrupt boot sector. So much for my December budget, but there wasn't really another option so I ordered a new laptop.
We do have a backup drive, but like most people I'm fairly lazy about backup, and hadn't done one in 2-3 months. Since I'd written a story and updated quite a few ongoing files in that time, I decided to try and get data straight off the old drive. First attempt was to just buy a drive enclosure and try to retrieve it via USB. No go - I still don't know why it failed because it could at least partially see the drive, but I tried a couple of different kinds of USB solutions and wasn't able to get at any files. Next, I attempted UBCD for Windows - until I realized that every copy of Windows in our house is from Dell, and the 'fix' for Dell CDs didn't work for the versions we own.
Finally, after 2 failures trying to build the UBCD for Windows ISO earlier today, I decided that I could live without 2 months of data, so I plugged in our backup drive to retrieve my files and it promptly failed...
At this point I started poking into online forums for possible solutions. Wading through 10 tons of crap, I finally found a somewhat useful suggestion. Using a demo version of RStudio Emergency Startup CD, I was at least able to confirm that the files were still accessible on the old drive - which I had been assuming, but wasn't positive.
The RStudio software looks interesting, and for different types of drive failures might be worth the money. However, being as cheap as I am, I really didn't want to pay $80 for their software to actually retrieve the files, so I kept digging.
Lo and behold, I found an article that reminded me that if I boot to Linux on a CD I could grab all my files for nothing:) Feeling incredibly stupid for not trying this a week ago, I got a copy of Ubuntu Live (I'm not actually really familiar with Ubuntu, but the article had a link straight to it) and I was good to go.
And the moral of the story is, even if you're like me and stuck using Windows 95% of the time, don't forget the ways Linux can still save your tail (for free).