Agreed, running it live off the DVD is a nice way to check it out.

The other cool thing about Linux is you can take the hard drive from a machine, plunk it into another, and it will run! It does a double-take the first time (whoa, this is different!) but it works. (Except: 64-bit installs only work on 64-bit systems. 32-bit installs run on everything.)

This is true. I've done it a few times.

With Windows, you can clone a hard drive, put the cloned drive back into the same computer the original came from, and it won't boot. Some cloning software does better than others at trying to iron out the Windows-induced difficulties. But in general, if you are expected a clone/swap like this to work in Windows, you are skating on thin ice. No way are you going to take a harddrive out of one Windows computer, insert it into a different computer, and get anything useful to happen.

Thanks

As long as I remember, I was never more stress-free in my whole life than in 2002, after finishing our house. We lived in OUR house, got free from paying reant, AND I had absolutely no money left in the bank . LOL.

Maybe one year from now, I will start building our next house. Almost a condo size, but will free me from lots and lots of stress. AND when finished, my bank account will be sparkling clean . LOL . I wont be worrying too much about hackers and e-robbers. LOL.

Your credit rating is worth defending, though. It affects everything from borrowing rates to insurance rates to employment prospects.

Edit: And on dating sites these days, a top-shelf credit rating is a particularly potent pheromone. A dealer-financed BMW is thin gruel in comparison.

Back to the meat and potatoes of this thread.

A few areas where my practical knowledge could be useful to others here:

- gardening / farming for food
- harvesting and heating with wood
- repairing and sharpening tools
- repairing and playing musical instruments
- repairing small appliances and electronics
- small scale solar power, chargers, inverters, rechargeable batteries
- troubleshooting water well and septic systems
- frugal living -- getting the best value for a buck
- five star scrounge -- knows where to get stuff for cheap/free
- information scrounge -- tenacious at researching in all areas

I thought I would share a "win" based on information I got from this thread (thanks Chaos!). A lady who runs a small business had water splashed on her laptop by her kids. No backups (argh!). Motherboard fried.

Staples told her there was no hope of getting her files back, and sold her another laptop. I put her hard drive in another machine and ran a couple of Linux live CDs I have kicking around. Couldn't mount the drive. Then I ran a live CD of Zorin OS Lite, and I was able to retrieve three years of business records, course work, and family photos.

She was understandably relieved, and grateful. That extends to you guys.

Well done dougwalkabout!

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of big box stores giving bad computer advice, I’m afraid.

Thanks again, Chaos. This is the way we can extend the ETS knowledge base out into our respective communities.

As for the big box store, I will only say that while I am in favour of honest free enterprise, I have zero tolerance for whatever mix of incompetence/scumbaggery was demonstrated here.

Good job! I have had similar successes saving friend's computers. Usually they cannot boot Windows, but I have been able to access the disk using Linux and copy their files off.

Zorin OS is Linux. Do you have any idea why Zorin worked and other Linux distros didn't? I have had a few instances where one LiveCD worked better than another for some task, and never figured out why. Generally I use SystemRescueCD (another Linux distro) because it contains lots of tools for recovering systems. You can add these tools to any Linux distro, but SystemRescueCD comes with them pre-installed (since it's whole purpose, evident by the name of the distro, is rescuing systems!)

I think the happiest user I ever "saved" was one who deleted 1000's of photos and cleared the wastebasket (on Windows). Then realized what they had done after the fact. When they called for help I said, "Don't touch anything, don't even breath, I'll be right over". Using the PhotoRec command on SystemRescueCD I was able to recover all of the photos.

On my computers, I have a small partition setup that holds SystemRescueCD (normally you don't install it to harddisk, but I did in this case). It's so small it's doesn't take up much room. So if I get into Deep DoDo I can just boot my computer from that partition. I also keep a DVD with SystemRescueCD on it for mobile rescues or in case my harddisk gets so screwed up that I can't even boot from that special partition. My main OS is on an SSD these days, but my computers still have harddisks in them too.

I don't know why Zorin worked. Other distros warned that the file system was in a dangerous state, no doubt from the system crash. So either Zorin was smarter or too dumb to notice, I don't know. (And yes, of course it's a Linux Ubuntu distro; my post wasn't clear.)

I'll check out SystemRescueCD. This sort of thing seems to land on my desk on occasion. One more tool in my toolbox.