The blog of Michael Rice

Well today I had 2 people contact me in a bind. Both people had the exact same type of problem and I managed to make 2 people happy tonight with the same Knoppix Live Linux CD. What happend was… The first person skipped out of work several hours early Friday, then took Saturday off thinking they would do the work at home only to find out the network admin at the office had them group policied out of being able to use the computer unless they were logging on the domain at the office that was now closed until monday…when the work is due. So knoppix to the resuce. I booted the computer up then mounted the local harddrive on the box by clicking on the icon on the desktop. Next I opened a terminal window and used scp to cp the data to my file server on the LAN then burned them a copy of the HD to a DVD (it was a small 4GB drive and they wanted a back up of the files anyway.)
The next person I felt pretty bad for. They called me up and said they had been working on a powerpoint presentation of school which was due on tuesday. They were working away and the computer just crashed. Well long story short they bought a new hard drive and then tried to get the old data off the old drive but windows wouldnt allow them to mount the drive (if thats even what windows calls it??) So my buddy put in the knoppix cd I had given him a few months back and whamo he can see the files ( he was a bit green in linux still so he didnt know how to get the files off) so I get a call from him asking to come salvage data for him. I went over and put in the same knoppix cd I had used for my first buddy booted the box, setup samba on the box with the problems, then loged on from another windows box he happend to have at home on his LAN and we got all the files they wanted. I know this is kinda cheesy but I figured I would share the good news