arctic Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 well, after reading the nice Mepis-story (pdf-creation,...) posted by gowator, i just thought: were there any other nice stories, how a live cd saved your day? (ot that of other people?) i had several such encounters. here is the first one: my dad is known to be a typical computer-user. he writes his documents, does some text-scans and voilà, everything is okay as long as his pupils get peppered with cervantes etc. and he uses windows, which is a good thing for him, because he has to scan lots of text-documents (linux is sadly still lacking something that can compete in the ocr area). he got only some slight tastes of linux and considers using it on his next comp, but that is another story.... but my dad is helpless with respect to computer diagnostics and problem solutions. so, one day, my dad phoned me, he was desperate. "my comp doesn`t start anymore, everything is dead!!! my documents... are they gone? what is happening?" i talked to him, asked him if there was maybe a virus or a trojan. logically, the answer was: "whaddoiknow?". no, i knew what i had to do: i jumped into the car, drove some 50 kilometers and took a bunch of windows-cds plus applications and linux-live cd's with me plus a cd-burner... just in case. i know my dad... :D when i arrived, my dad was really desperate. he had the work of four years on this comp. i asked him if he had made some backups of his data, he replied: "nope, i don`t have a burner, because i don`t know if it works with my comp. and i don`t know how to use them..." okay, i thought and went to the box. i had almost forgotten that he still had an old p166 with 64 mb ram and a 4 gb and one 2 gb hdd. duh... :lol: i started the comp, the hd klicked all the time, while bios said, no os, no hdd available. i examined bios, ran a virus disk (good old f-prot) and there didn`t seem to be something serious affecting the bios. i tried to get the hdd back working via bios. no way... i just thought... is everything lost? hd killed? :unsure: okay, let`s try a linux live-cd... inserted knoppix and BOOM... not enough memory, only twm available. shit. i hate twm. now, i changed the cd, my dad watching at his strangely-looking box, while booting up damn small linux. okay, here we go. i examined the hardware and the primary hd was okay. first smile on my dads face. i examined the box further and found out that his 2 gb-slave hd got killed. not too dramatic as it was only for storage of crap (unformatted scans and some text-documents he found on internet, so they could be retrieved, etc.). finally i realized that the dead hd managed to start a chain reaction that somehow killed the mbr of hd1. i used the win rescue-disk to restore that one, after taking the damaged hd out, and made a backup of his senistive data with the cd-burner later on. and i never saw my dad that happy, seeing that windows98 bootscreen. :) the reward i got was a tap on my shoulder and the quote: "one day, i will use linux, my son... i will." :lol: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Adriano Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 Snif. That brought a happy tear to my eye. Thanks for the story. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 Don't forget to hold him to his promise! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Padma Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 I have nothing so dramatic to report, but my day WAS saved a while back by a live-cd. :) I was running out of space, and looking at DiskDrake, I said, "Hey! I've got about 3 gig of unused space right here between my Win partition and my MDK partitions." So I formatted it, figuring I would use it as a download/storage area for things. Then I rebooted to see how everything looked. Oh, wait. I didn't tweak lilo.config! Now I can't even boot into Linux! Smacking myself for being so stupid, I dug out my Knoppix CD, inserted it, and booted up. My relief was palpable as I proceeded to fix my mistake. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmkh Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 You're a very very bad son for not offering to your dad a burner so that he coudd backup his data. Very bad son, indeed :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted August 17, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 You're a very very bad son for not offering to your dad a burner so that he coudd backup his data. Very bad son, indeed :-) yeah, you are right... but he will get a new comp (costs 299 euro), sponsored by me next month. and there will be a burner included. i swear!... :lol: addendum: he still has to learn how to backup hi files... ouch... this will take some hours. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
luizmdk Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 In the computer of the work of my father it uses ***** of windows 2000, the computer caught a virus, my father detected the archive of the virus but it did not obtain to erase the archive nor in security way, the virus to the few was erasing the archives of the computer it not wise person what to make it it had 2 solutions to call the support that would only go to be able to go in the following day and to call me that I do not have nothing to make after the school, I took Kurumin Linux(Baseado in the Knoppix), with the Kurumin I entered in the partition fat32 of windows 2000 is installed and was only to erase the virus was only to press the keyboard key ''delete'' It was very simple and my father ja had attemped Norton Anti-Virus, Ad-Ware, SpyBot, AVG and nothing he advanced. This happened has 3 months today my father has a copy of the Kurumin Linux to erase the stubborn viruses that appear in the Rwindow$$ B) B) B) B) B) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 Well, in my new job of computer repair and service, we use Knoppix constantly. We've been able to recover data from many HDs when the box would not boot from HD. Recently, a customer wanted to know if it was possible to move his entire Windows installation from his laptop to his new HD on his desktop. "Hmmmmm," we thought, "Theoretically, that should be possible with Knoppix running on both computers to scp the whole contents of the laptop's HD across, registry and everything." So, we installed Windows on the desktop, just to be sure there was a good instance of it in the mbr and booted both computers with Knoppix. Started ssh on the laptop and scp'ed everything over through Midnight Commander. Worked like a charm! If only all systems could boot from a thumb drive, I could carry Damn Small Linux around in my pocket for just such occasions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 (edited) You're a very very bad son for not offering to your dad a burner so that he coudd backup his data. Very bad son, indeed :-) yeah, you are right... but he will get a new comp (costs 299 euro), sponsored by me next month. and there will be a burner included. i swear!... :lol: addendum: he still has to learn how to backup hi files... ouch... this will take some hours. ;) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Costs 299 euro... hm... This one? http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7465907417.html http://www.carrefour-multimedia.fr/data/fr...e=N000000001254 Good son! Good son! :D Edited August 17, 2004 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Urza9814 Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 Uh...I don't have anything too serious, but I got several times it was very helpful: Well, I'm kinda running winXP on this comp illegally I guess...I used the CD from my other comp when the restore CD broke for this one...for my mom uses windoze a lot and needed it...and I occasionally want to play games...lol...anyways, since it's already registered, I have to reinstall every 30 days. Well, long story short when I went to install, it didn't have the 'leave this drive formatted as it is' option for some reason...so I quit the install, but not only did that remove my bootloader, it somehow screwed up X or somethin'...so I couldn't get into Linux to backup my stuff...well, I didn't actually use Morphix for that...I put the hard drive in my other comp and moved the stuff onto it's drive...but uh...I COULDA used morphix...and it was still quite helpful in making this comp useful for a few hours while I was transferring the 6gigs of C:\ drive off this comp (yes, only 6 gigs...the win hdd is 15, some is taken for the system partition, and some is an alternate linux part., curently Debian :P) It's also been very helpful all the other times this comp has crashed/died/exploded (err....:P) for the same reason... Then, there is EBCD, which isn't a LiveCD, but it is Linux-based...I've used that on everything from viruses to helping my gf get back into her laptop after her sister screwed with the admin password. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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