And Lightning Doesn't Strike Twice?

So you believed the tale that lightning never strikes twice? You never thought that maybe - just maybe - nobody ever reported a second strike 'cos they were already dead from the first one?

No more than four days after the last tale of Windows woe I get called by the dad of one of my son's friends. "My son's computer died" he said, "Do you think you could look at it?". I suppose a certain amount of desperation was creeping into his tone of voice (small hints like the "How much do you charge?" phrase), so I went over that night to see. The problem was that his netbook would not boot properly into Windows, giving this message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
"WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM". 

 This is not a happy message to see. The files in the config directory are your registry, so this means that the system hive (part) of your registry - probably the most important part - is gone. Without it Windows has no idea what parts of Windows are where, so nothing starts!

There are programs that claim to help you to recover from this problem, but not only did I not have them but I was also constrained by time. So we got his external USB Optical drive, connected it, put in a Linux live image DVD, and tried to boot. Same message!

Drat!! F2 to get to the BIOS and change the boot device sequence (it was an Acer One, so under "Boot" in the BIOS menus). Try again. Same message. Huh??? Check the BIOS - should start from hard drive last, so why isn't it? Turn machine totally off, disconnect optical drive (that uses one USB socket) and try another (that uses a double-headed cable).

Success!! Select PartedMagic. Look at the hard drive ... there are two? Oh! 155 GB and 5 GB means that there's a normal one and a recovery one. Excellent!!

Spent the next hour taking all the irreplaceable personal files off the hard drive and onto a USB drive. Once that's done we used the disk checker in PartedMagic to review the SMART data from the hard drive. It all looked good, so replacement was ok to do.

Reboot yet again - without the optical drive - and hit F6. This got us the menu for replacing the content of the hard drive from the recovery partition. 30 minutes later we had a "brand new" PC!!

Yes, we could have done the system recovery without Linux, but not without losing all the data from the machine. Oh, and no, I didn't charge!

 TTFN

What Do You Do When Windows Doesn't ......?

You don't really think much about it when your laptop dies because of a low battery. You just put it away and plug it in to feed when you get to an outlet. Once attached to the electrical umbilical you just restart it and continue with your work, games, chatting, or whatever.

So this friend of mine - a student, as it happens - rings up a few days ago at about 5 pm to say that the above was just exactly what had happened ... up until it was time for Windows to re-launch. The all she was getting was a prompt to reboot again.

Well, it could have been a root-kit virus, or an OS failure, or a hard drive failure - from 500 miles away I couldn't tell, but what we did know was that she needed to get her data off the hard drive and also to get a system up so she could finish a paper.

Enter the "Live Distro"!!  You'll have seen magazines on sale with CDs packaged in them. There are at least four (Linux Format, Linux Pro Magazine, Ubuntu User, and Linux User and Developer) that normally carry a CD or DVD in their packaging containing a bootable version of the operating system. The idea is to let people try out the system to see if they like it without installing a whole new OS just to find they hate it!

However, because pretty much all Linux versions now have drivers to read Microsoft's NTFS file system, they make excellent rescue systems!

So she went and got a magazine, opened the case and popped the DVD in to the drive in her laptop and rebooted the machine. When it started it asked her if she wanted to boot from removable disc, and she said Yes. Three or four simple questions (keyboard, time, date, timezone, etc). After that she was in to a functioning modern operating system.

After getting all valuable information off, she found that Libre Office let her open her Windows 2010 Word and PowerPoint documents and finish everything up. Her VB.Net coursework is (luckily) complete, otherwise it would have been an install of Mono and Eclipse!

And Windows? Dell are sending her a recovery disk set and, if that doesn't work, it'll be returned for hardware recovery. Of course, there's always the alternative of popping in a new hard drive and running Linux natively, with maybe a VM with Windows ....

So, to all those of you who panic when Windows fails: help is at hand - just as far away as your nearest Barnes & Noble store! The magazines (they're all British, by the way) cost about $16, so as a way of getting at your data despite a death of Windows it is probably the cheapest method going!

TTFN