On Friday I got home after roughly 16 hours in airplanes and airports, a few days in South San Francisco (Tuesday - Thursday), a football weekend in Pittsburgh (Saturday - Monday), a day trip to Plymouth Meeting (Friday), another to suburban Philly (Thursday), and a visit to New York City (Wednesday) to find my home PC crashed.
The computer wouldn't load windows and when I plugged my external hard-drive into another machine, I found the back-up I thought was running regularly hadn't since 2007.
Suffice it to say I was unhappy.
This is not my first crash, the last one prompted the purchasee of the external drive. So I decided to not only try to recover the machine, but to also try out linux in order to avoid this from happening in the future.
I decided to go with the Debian version of Linux (learn about Linux here). The biggest challenge was creating the boot disk. Eventually, I downloaded CDBurnerXP (available here), downloaded "netinst" or more specifically, debian-40r5-i386-netinst.iso, and got an old laptop I had that wasn't being used to test on. I made a few configuration changes to the BIOS based on the installation guide (available here), and put the cd in the drive. It was self explanatory once the cd was inserted. In a reasonably short time, I had wiped the laptop clean of windows and entered the world of Linux.
The installation included a desktop with two web browsers, a feed reader, email client, open office suite (like MS Office), some games and other accessories. Haven't had much of a chance to test, but will over time and let everyone know how it works.
Now if I could only recover the lost data on the windows machine, I'll be rather happy despite the lost time this weekend.
4 comments:
Hi,
You can download Knoppix, burn the iso to CD, boot up w/ the Knoppix CD and you can recover your data. -copy it to a thumbdrive. I've done this countless times and have been 100% successful.
Here's the knoppix link: http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html
You could always bring it by and let me have a crack at recovering the data.... No recover no cost...
Thanks Rich and John!
My office IT person is going to take care of it when I head to the main office this week.
I tried unsuccessfully to install the harddrive from machine that wouldn't start into a desktop that did as the slave drive, but couldn't get it to be recognized.
Not sure if it was due to type of drive (one had ribbon, IDE?, and other didn't SATO?), at any rate they have compassion for me and will try to recover what was on there, but if that fails I've now got two more options!
Something we all should know - check your back up system! I really ought to know better:-(
My experience with OS's can be distilled to this..
My Ford is always in need of repair.
My Porsche is expensive to replace.
My Fiat does break down occasionally and is hard to find a mechanic for.
I bite the bullet and buy the Porsche. Not to mention, it runs in Ford and/or Fiat mode all at once. ;-)
Post a Comment