Posted on 10/21/2010 8:48:26 AM PDT by Keltik
Here's an update for all those who were fascinated yesterday by the story of how my laptop crashed and my frantically desperate attempts to revive it -- you can read the whole sordid story here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2610874/posts
With Windows not rebooting, System Repair's refusal to repair the system, futile stabs at reaching system restore or re-imaging (even through command prompt), I finally was able to reach the BIOS panel and set my PC to start on CD first. I was mostly unprepared for a crash, but thank goodness I had at least burned Recovery DVDs. I loaded them and was able to reinstall Windows.
I lost all my data. Fortunately I had saved about 50 gigs of music to a PHD about a week ago. I still lost 5-10 GBs of music, some non-family pics, a few non-vital documents, and all my bookmarks.
Considering some posters yesterday were telling me I would have to send the PC to the shop and it might even be unrepairable anyway, I guess I got off lucky.
So let this be a lesson to you -- BE PREPARED. Burn your recovery disks. I'm off to DL some system restore points and figure out what re-imaging is.
To everybody who offered help, thanks.
We have been told since the first hard drive crash on the PC in the early 80s to do regular backups, have an emergency reboot disk...but very few people bother.
That’s no way to live on the edge, man. :O)
I don’t know if I would trust that hard drive anymore. Might want to consider putting in a new one.
I just looked at your thread from yesterday and recently fixed a PC that had the same exact problem. Used Puppy Linux to get all her “important” files, i.e., documents, movies, etc. off the hard drive before I reinstalled Windows. Shame nobody mentioned Puppy Linux yesterday. You burn it to a CD-R and then boot from the CD and when it loads you’ll see your directory structure and you can just drag and drop what you need to your flash drive.
Odds are some drivers and likely files associated with them were corrupt. In that case reinstalling Windows and the drivers should do the trick.
I have a bunch of blank CD’s but I have no clue how to make a live disc of Linux
Do you know how to burn an iso image?
I know! I have always taken extra precautions. One thing that I found...You cannot even depend on some of the “rescue” disks. Once I found a good backup system that worked, I have stuck with it. No more “experimenting”. I use Acronis exclusively now.
I use rsync to an external USB HDD. Rather cost effective.
What is an iso image?
lol
You might be able to get a copy of an .iso of something called “Hirens Boot CD” online, then use a CD/DVD utility to burn the .iso image to a DVD-R blank. Set your laptop to boot from CD and pop it in. The newer versions (v11.xx) are collections of freeware, but older ones included copies of commercial utilities as well. Very helpful in recovering data from damaged hard drives.
Always keep an external hard drive handy. Copy all files you want to save to it and also run back up software and make sure the backup goes to the external drive. I don’t know if Win7 has it or not but you can also use the recovery console to restore the boot capability of an XP machine, IF you have the regular XP installation disk and not a recovery disk. The absolutely best way to restore everything is to get an imaging program, such as Ghost, and make an image of your machine about once a month, put the image on an external drive or onto a DVD. This allows you to restore the system to exactly what you had on it before.
How many people use a external hard drive? I have a firewire drive for my iMac just “in case”. of course even they are fallible as I found out when the power supply died...
Once you've verified that you have the ability to burn iso images, go to either Pendrive Linux or The LiveCD List and choose the distribution ("distro" in Linux lingo) that sounds like a good fit for you.
If you have no idea, I'd recommend several options--Knoppix, Puppy, Ubuntu, or Fedora.
I personally use Fedora, but I think most people think it's not good for new people. It's hard for me to tell because I've been using it for 7 years now, and Linux in general since 1993.
Anyway, Once you've downloaded the Live CD version of the distro you decided on, save it to disk , then use your CD burning software to burn that image. That should be it.
Whichever one will let me play Scorched 3-D, which does not have a Windows Vista version, last I checked.
:p
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