Help - major windows crash / lost data :(

[berniedicters]

That was cruel

I thought so, too. If that had been me on the receiving end of that, I'd be feeling very bruised and hurt by now. I'm sure Jonti's advice was made in good faith, and at least nobody could accuse him(?) of being inconsistent.

((jonti))

 

[boskysquelch]

I'm just not sure if Linux really does need to be pushed, at least not in the aftermath of threads like this.

where's your suggestion to remedy?

...now you know a Linux/Ubuntu LiveCd may help you in a similar circumstance should it ever befall you...or not!


Spinrite may have helped tooo...still might...who knows!

 

[Jonti]

In repair and recovery situation I think you need to push something more usable like DSL, Puppy, partedmagic, Gparted & SystemRescueCd. I know not all of these are simple to use and command line voodoo might be your last resort however they can rescue data without resorting to taking the computer to bits or playing with a full blown OS which can drag any system to it knees running in liveCD mode.

Distrowatch is a good place to start for those who are thinking Linux freaks are from another planet

http://distrowatch.com/

There certainly are a slew of very powerful tools available on liveCDs -- and a person can even make their own remarkably easily with Puppy Linux. Yep, you can install Puppy, add the software you want to the installation, then use Puppy to make a liveCD that even contains the software you added. Fantastic stuff!

I wouldn't myself encourage folks to use these tools to repair their borked Windows system. I do understand they can be used like that -- after booting from a liveCD you can amend any file on the harddisk in any way you want! It's just that I don't know enough about Windows to go down that route myself.

But we often get people asking how to rescue their data files. That's all they want to do -- they're quite happy to reinstall XP after salvaging their data. This is easy with an Ubuntu* liveCD and a USB device. The message bears repeating until it becomes part of any serious user's potential bag of tricks.


* actually, any live CD will do, but Ubuntu is remarkably easy to use, and quite a few folks have experience of it now