The other day a friend told me that her computer had crashed and tech support had told her there was no hope; she’d never be able to get her prized photos off her year-old Fujitsu laptop. I asked what she was running and she said Vista. I’ve never had the opportunity to use/misuse Vista, so I offered my services.
The box didn’t boot in safe mode or any mode. The bios functions said the drive was working properly, so I concluded that Vista was hosed.
The laptop came with a ‘recovery disk’ to be inserted in such circumstances. I did a ‘repair’, which in a hour or so announced it had failed. It then advised me to reinstall Vista, and of course added the text line that I should have backed up my files beforehand- the eternal loop error of the Microsoft system– I wouldn’t be here if she had backed up her system, obviously.
I would have hung the drive off another one as a slave, but I didn’t have any such parts lying around; I was going to have to try something else.
An internet search turned up Ubuntu as a possibility. I ran Ubuntu (a freeware linux kernel) from the dvd drive, had to do a few tricky things to force mount the folders (command line style) so I could see them, but I was in– I was seeing her picture folders.
I was not as successful in having Ubuntu to see my external (mac formatted) drive to write to it, but no matter, I copied her data with a flash drive.
In conclusion, I keep wondering how Microsoft gets away with this, the closed, crashing operating systems, combined with people who don’t back up their data. Millions of computers come shipped with this operating system, and from what I’ve read/experienced, it’s just a bunch of bloatware. I could go on and on, but I will end with saying, you can use linux to recover your Windows data if Vista is hosed. Viva Ubuntu!
Jack Silbert, curator