Ubuntu saved the day

[ade234uk]

My wife's, dad friend phoned me about a computer problem. Vista had gone up the shoot and as usual the restore did not work, what's new lol. He did not care about Vista, he was desperate to get at his documents.

He popped around with his laptop. I popped the Ubuntu disk in, loaded Ubuntu and up popped the Vista drive. I then backed up all the documents from Vista on to his external hard drive.

We then reinstalled Vista.

Let me just say, he was made up. He could not believe you could load an operating system from a CD and was so happy to have his documents.

He then paid me £50 for my troubles. I did him an invoice as I am self employed, but I was really chuffed. Like I say family and friends usually get away stock free so it was extra bonus.

Thank you Ubuntu, now where do I make a small donation?

[RyanthePenguin]

I usually have a LiveCD or USB stick with me for that very reason. When I was deployed to Iraq, I was able to recover my sector leader's pictures of his newborn son and wife from a crashed Vista install. Needless to say, he was grateful. LiveCDs make it easy to love linux.

[marin123]

10.04 32 bit livecd, it can boot on anything... when someone is in computer trouble its first aid :)

[Dry Lips]

Thank you Ubuntu, now where do I make a small donation?

Now, that's a really good question... I guess you could support Canonical
by buying some of their products...

http://shop.canonical.com/
https://one.ubuntu.com/

However, Canonical is a commercial company, so I don't know if they
accept donations. Anyway, supporting the Linux community economically
is a very good idea... Lot's of Open Source projects receive donations..

[Ralob]

Ubuntu and other Linux Live CD's have saved my and my family's bacon more than a couple of times when Windows has been contrary, or hardware problems arise. I always have one in my laptop bag, just in case.

[barthus]

Ubuntu and other Linux Live CD's have saved my and my family's bacon more than a couple of times when Windows has been contrary, or hardware problems arise. I always have one in my laptop bag, just in case.

I do actually the same, I always have a couple of USB sticks in my bag. Some versions of Ubuntu, Puppy Linux etc.

[undecim]

I do actually the same, I always have a couple of USB sticks in my bag. Some versions of Ubuntu, Puppy Linux etc.

It's also good to have Grub CD to boot USB drives on older machines. That way you can always rewrite the contents of your USB drive to change distros.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

I'm glad you were able to help your father-in-law's friend.

I have a rescue kit on hand for similar situations with the Ultimate Boot CD, BackTrack CD, DSL CD, Puppy Linux CD, Ubuntu LTS CD, and a CD with various forensic, network analysis, and anti-virus/malware/etc. tools. I also keep a persistent Ubuntu LTS USB in my car boot. You never know when you might need them. They don't have to be the current releases. After you salvage someone's data, get their computer working again, or fix whatever problem they have, you can upgrade them later to the current version or reinstall their old software.

I have had people tell me that I couldn't salvage their data from the computer because they had an account that was password protected. When I did salvage the data; because, the hard drive partitions mounted to the CD/USB OS, they realized they were not as secure as they thought they were and I got the :shock: look.