But as usual, it wasn't really me, but the tools I was using. Most specifically Ubuntu. I know I've gone on, sometimes at annoying length, about how brilliant this is, but I have to start the process again.
This is what happened:
Yesterday I received a call from one of the teachers at my school, begging for help. Her laptop had been in the middle of some routine Windows updates (an every day occurrence, if my PC is anything to go by), when it'd re-booted, and would no longer boot up. It'd get halfway through the boot up process, you'd even get the Vista progress bar, but then it'd restart again. Windows itself suggested putting in the original Vista disk and choosing Repair once it'd started.
However, and oh my god this is the most annoying thing on the face of the planet, probably deserving of it's own rant in my main blog, the laptop had been bought from Tesco, but did not have an OS disk. Given how many pages came up when I googled "Vista repair" telling you to boot from the OS disk and select repair, you'd think that this would be one of the fundamental requirements of a new system, whomsoever supplied it. She did, as it happens, have the Vista OS disk supplied with another machine, but sadly the OEM disk for the Mesh machine refused to work in the ACER laptop. Really, it's all very well trying to stop people stealing the software, but all I wanted to do was repair the installation. This took me quite some time to find out anyway, firstly because the PC was set to boot from the HD first, and secondly because the DVD was so grubby I had to clean it thoroughly before it would do more than just make funny noises in the drive.
"So, how much data do you have on the disk, and how much of it do you REALLY not need to lose?" I queried of my luckless teacher. Her reply that there wasn't very much, but that it was all quite important, was really to be expected.
Many laptops, I consoled myself, are supplied with a "restore to how it arrived from the factory" image, nowadays placed in a hidden partition, so you can't do as my father did, and delete it, because you're convinced that you can't live without that massive 9.8Gb of your 250Gb disk. A short while later, armed with the necessary keypresses to start the factory restore, I was informed by the user that while she might, at a pinch, be able to find the data again, it'd be very inconvenient, and couldn't I do anything to get it.
Well, in theory, you can boot up a PC with a live version of Ubuntu, see the disk, and copy to a USB stick. Can't you? I wasn't sure, because I'd supplied an Ubuntu live disk to one of my students in the past, when he was having trouble accessing the disk, but he'd reported back that he couldn't access the hard drive at all. OK, Ubuntu has moved on since then - remember earlier this year when I reported that my phone became a modem for the eee PC without any kind of real work on my part? Maybe later versions of Ubuntu would, indeed, allow access to the hard drive. I suppose it's always possible that the student had either been not quite as clever as I'd assumed, or perhaps his disk was royally mullered. Remember that's the technical term.
So I moseyed over to the Ubuntu site, downloaded the latest ISO, burned a CD-r, and shoved it into the laptop drive. In moments the PC was showing the familiar brown (really, not a flattering colour) desktop, and seconds after that I was wading my way through the mess of stuff on the local hard disk. I put in a USB mouse to assist with copying data over, inserted my USB stick and saved the day. Well, Ubuntu saved the day.
After that I went through the time-consuming process of restoring to factory image and running through the "I see you've not run Vista on this machine ever - let's go through the patronising process of asking painfully silly questions to set up the machine in a way that the manufacturer should have done before selling it in Tesco in the first place" task. And the equally soul-searing "Windows is unprotected, because you wouldn't let us install the poxy 90-day trial of Norton" and "There are updates to install, click here to spend, quite literally, hours downloading and installing cumulative updates, only to find, on reboot, that you've still got a small handful we didn't bother to install first time round" tasks.
After which I was able to copy the data over to the laptop, and press it back into the hands of the, initially happy, user, who was surprised I charged £40 for this! Despite trying to console her with the sure knowledge that PC World would not only have NOT bothered to attempt to save her data, AND they'd have charged twice as much, I don't think I'll be getting any repeat business from her! I felt that 2 hours at my "what I charge the teachers" rate was not wrong, since I was able to (and actually did) wander away from the PC during the "factory restore" and "Widows Update" parts.
While I may be feeling pretty good about my own skills, my gratitude has to go to Ubuntu for actually being such a fantastic OS.
