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Esau.

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Well, some may remember me saying I had a HDD crash before christmas. Well, turned out to be some serious issues - errors reading "unmountable boot device" and "uncorrectable sector errors" basically.

Anyway, I tried every fix I could find online to no avail (and yes, I tried everything - 2 months worth of trying) aside from reformatting of course. So, after talking with a few tech support folks it came down to "sorry man, it's a lost cause - your HDD is failing or has failed." Pretty much no way to fix it. Recovery wouldn't be easy without paying for it, even then it wouldn't be 100% I was told.

Well, a german trader friend of mine turned me onto Knoppix Live CD - a Free and Open Source Live Linux CD, with a boatload of features. You can also set it up to use off a USB flash drive (1 GB min. required), basically its an OS that runs off a CD/DVD or USB Flash drive instead of off a HDD.

So today I decided to give it a go and what do you know, I can now access all my data! 200+ GB of live DVDs, 70GB of live shows & 50GB of mp3s moreless. Not to mention every program I have on my HDD. I can even go online with it if I wanted to. Now all I have to do is install another CDROM so I can use my DVD burner. Fuck I'm a happy soul right now!

I'm glad I didn't fall for the "reinstall windows" advice which would have lost all the data. I'd say anyone who has ever expirenced serious data loss should download this CD & have a copy on reserve. Its saving my assets thats for sure.

Time for some whiskey. Woo-hoo.

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I'm bustin' right now. Paitence has never been a strong point for me but this time its paid off huge.

Here's the link to the flash drive instructions.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01/01/usb-knoppix-510/

I've also have this set up and it works just as good as the CD version. Highly recommend this program. Very user friendly.

I'm outta here now for some drinking, saturday & sunday are recovery days (in a couple ways). Have a good one.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here's one major rule when you get a computer: Partition your hard drive. Most people leave the default of just C: drive. This means that if you have to reinstall windows, you wipe everything. If you take the time to partition your drive (it's really easy with partition magic) you can make a D: (or more) drive. If you have to reinstall windows, only C: gets wiped, whatever other partitions you have on there are fine (unless you really killed the hard drive which can happen). This means that a quick reinstall of windows and shabam, all the files are still there (the programs should still get installed on C: and will have to be reinstalled). This has saved me countless times. I've got knoppix and it's great but if you partition, you'll save yourself a headache later on.

An even better solution is to use a 40gig or smaller HDD just for windows and programs and get another physical drive to store data on. That's the safest bet of all.

Disclaimer: Like I said, if you really screw up the drive (or it gets physically damaged), you're up shit creek. If you only do something like delete the file/partition/boot table or even erase C:, you're fine.

My two cents

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