Earlier this week I had an experience where using Linux got me out of trouble in a relatively quick and easy manner. The catch? It was kind of Linux’s fault that I was in trouble in the first place.
Around halfway through November my Linux install on my laptop crapped out, and really fucked things up hard. However, my Windows install wasn’t affected, so I started using Windows on my laptop primarily, while switching to an openSUSE VM on my desktop for my home computing needs.
About a week back I decided it was time to reinstall Linux on my laptop, since exams and my 600 hojillion final projects were out of the way. I booted into Win7, nuked the partitions being used by Linux and… went and got some pizza and forgot to finish my install. Turns out I hadn’t restarted my PC anywhere between that day and when shit hit the fan. When I did restart, I was informed to the merry tune of a PC Speaker screech that my computer had no bootable media.
… Well shit.
My first reaction was to try again, my second was to check to make sure the hard drive was plugged in firmly. After doing this a few times, I was so enraged about my lost data that I was about ready to repave the whole drive when I had the good sense to throw in a BartPE live CD and check to see if there was any data left on the drive. To my elation, all of my data was still in tact! It was at this precise moment I thought to myself “Oh drat, I bet I uninstalled that darned GRUB bootloader. Fiddlesticks!”
However, all was not lost. I know that Linux is great and is capable of finding other OS installs during its install and setting them up in GRUB without me having to look around for a windows boot point and do it myself. 20 minutes and an openSUSE install later, everything was back to normal on my laptop, Win7 and openSUSE 11.1 included!
As we speak I’m attempting an in-place upgrade to openSUSE 11.2 so hopefully I get lucky and everything goes smoothly!
Why do I have a feeling that you were actually thinking of something other than “Oh drat, I bet I uninstalled that darned GRUB bootloader. Fiddlesticks!†😛
Blast, you saw through my clever ruse.
I used an old Ubuntu 8 live disk a few days ago to recover some data from a crashed machine of my own. As a rescue environment, a Ubuntu live disk puts Bart PE to shame.
I have to agree. BartPE is good if you’re in a pinch but considering the flexibility and, frankly, power that a full OS live CD gives you there is no better choice than a Linux Live CD.
For anyone who’s interested, the upgrade worked. Until I tried to get graphics drivers working properly. Then it crashed again.