Originally Posted By: dougwalkabout
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.

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.