The notebook itself seems thrashed, holding the power button down will flash the power LED, then it just blinks out (kinda sad). Obviously I’m not getting at the data on the disk if I have to use this machine. I yank the disk, toss it into another lappy (same model) and insert a Knoppix 3.9 boot CD. To my chagrin, the poor little disk is hurting too. I got a horrid click/crunch noise during POST and the system couldn’t find the disk. Dismayed, I pulled the drive, tapped it ever so slightly and tried again. No joy. OK, I have another idea, I grab a ziplock bag (thanks to the ladies in AP, they ALWAYS have “stuff” around, I always find the strangest things in their area), pop the drive into it and stick the whole thing into the freezer for an hour and a half (passing the time by drinking coffee and hoping this works).

Now that it’s frozen, I take the disk, slide it back into the lappy and start it up. No hard disk noises at all, it’s just not spinning up. Well, we’re getting to the point where I won’t have the tools to save the data. So, I says to myself, “screw it” and whacked the disk off of the top of my desk a couple of times and try again. JOY! The drive spins up!

Note to self: violence is better than cold…

I boot from the CD into the Knoppix KDE desktop, mount /dev/hda2 (which is where XP lives on this machine) and use scp to transfer the contents of her “My Documents” folder to my Fedora machine here at work. The command looked like scp -r /mnt/hda2/Documents\ and\ Settings/[username]/My\ Documents/ xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: (I removed her username and my IP from the example).

Dell will be in to replace the ever so toasted motherboard (and anything else that’s been trashed) and I can hand it all back to her with her data in place.

Just another illustration of the power of Linux, there was no way I could have added this drive to a desktop machine here at work without buying a laptop drive conversion kit. Knoppix was the PERFECT solution.

Over the weekend my wife brought me a co-workers XP Home machine that would freeze following POST, you know, right about the time the system attempted to boot.. I planned on wiping the machine and using it’s recovery partition to restore the OS, and that’s what I did. Just before reloading the box, I burned a copy of the Knoppix 5.01 DVD, booted into the live KDE interface, mounted a samba share served by my Ubuntu desktop, and copied everything from the user’s profile on the broken box to my system. It was a breeze and took no time at all.

I’ve fixed similar problems in the past but it usually required physically moving the hard disk to a working system, copying the data off, moving the disk back, reloading it and then copying the user’s data back. I found that method to be preferable to mucking about with XP rescue, which I found to be hit or miss.

This is one of many reasons I’m loving the Linux experience. Knowing how to use a tool like Knoppix makes fixing things for others a pleasure instead of an annoyance. Looking back, the first time I tried Knoppix I couldn’t do much more than stare at it. Now, it just feels right. I can start it up, do what I need to and move on. The last few months have been a terrific learning experience.

For anyone interested in the commands I used to mount the samba share, I opened a terminal session on the Knoppix/Windows box and did the following:

mkdir Desktop/ubuntu

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.99/download Desktop/ubuntu -o user=matt

The first command created an “ubuntu” folder on my Knoppix desktop. The second mounted the “download” share from my Ubuntu machine (which has the IP address of 192.168.1.99) to the folder created in step one. The options at the end of the second command just specified that I wanted to connect as user “matt”. After entering my password I was ready to start dragging directories and files from the broken machine to the ~/Desktop/ubuntu mount.

I could have gone an even easier route, just opening konqueror and browsing to the share would have gotten me the same results. I prefer mounting via the command line, I want to have the options burned to into my memory so I can do it whether the box runs a GUI or not.