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Anything I need to know? Daughter's laptop needs a nuke from orbit but I'd like to get her data off to an e-sata external HD that's NTFS-formatted. Not played in this stream for a long while (i.e. pre-NTFS write capability) and just want to reassure myself before the orbital bombardment.

EDIT: Using a 12.04 Live CD.

It always Just Works^TM for me.

I suppose the only thing you might run into is that if the laptop didn't shut down properly and left the file system dirty Ubuntu might refuse to mount it automatically. IIRC the error window provides the command you need to force mounting or you can run checkdisk from the windows recovery console first.

Been a while since I ran into that so I could be wrong.

Happily saving stuff as I type so it does Just Work.

Last time daughter gets admin (all parents have moments of weakness).

In a situation like this I typically just grab an image of the whole drive (CLI 'dd' tool is your friend).

just brew it! wrote:

In a situation like this I typically just grab an image of the whole drive (CLI 'dd' tool is your friend).

I had an image saved, but Windows says it's not genuine (huh? Image was generated by the same copy that's corrupted) and won't let me reauthenticate. Blue screens every time I try & I can't even get to the "dial in for a new ID" screen.

Whatever she did to it, she did it good. At least all of the data is secured.

Captain Ned wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

In a situation like this I typically just grab an image of the whole drive (CLI 'dd' tool is your friend).

I had an image saved, but Windows says it's not genuine (huh? Image was generated by the same copy that's corrupted) and won't let me reauthenticate. Blue screens every time I try & I can't even get to the "dial in for a new ID" screen.

Yuck.

That isn't quite what I meant though. What I typically do in situations like this is save off an image of the raw drive in its current state; this allows me to nuke the original system from orbit and get it back on the air quickly. Any data recovery/forensics can then be done offline (by attaching the disk image to a VM). Probably overkill in your case though... I guess I'm wearing my part-time IT support hat.

Captain Ned wrote:

Whatever she did to it, she did it good. At least all of the data is secured.

...and that's what really matters!

After some painful times I figured out that the HD was going/gone (again). Ubuntu on LiveCD worked perfectly and reinstalled/authenticated Windows wouldn't, ergo the SSD on order (daughter really likes to move laptop around while running, which explains the SMART errors) should cure this problem. Glad that Ubuntu let me pull off all the data 'cause the last time I did this the whine went on for a month or two. Only downside is that I'll probably burn an Win7 OEM license in the process.

Nah, put a Linux on it and tell her she can have Windows back once she figures out how to crack root.

bthylafh wrote:

Nah, put a Linux on it and tell her she can have Windows back once she figures out how to crack root.

I would except for a school-related app (some band thing that records her playing for homework submission) doesn't have a Linux version and sound recording under Wine isn't something I feel like tackling right about now.

Captain Ned wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

Nah, put a Linux on it and tell her she can have Windows back once she figures out how to crack root.

I would except for a school-related app (some band thing that records her playing for homework submission) doesn't have a Linux version and sound recording under Wine isn't something I feel like tackling right about now.

Heh, I remember that app (or something similar) too. IIRC it was one of the things that forced my hand on upgrading the kids' PCs to WinXP back in the day.

Captain Ned wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

Nah, put a Linux on it and tell her she can have Windows back once she figures out how to crack root.

I would except for a school-related app (some band thing that records her playing for homework submission) doesn't have a Linux version and sound recording under Wine isn't something I feel like tackling right about now.

Linux + VirtualBox/VMWare. Setup the VM with everything she needs and get it configured, then snapshot it. If you have problems, just revert to the snapshot. Its a little more work up front, but it seems to work pretty well in the long run. Just a thought. As far as NTFS write goes, so long as the disk was cleanly shutdown , I have had no problems with NTFS write for a couple of years now.

--SS

And the great Linux experiment starts. Got a new SSD and put Kubuntu 12.04 LTS on it (KDE makes more visual sense to me than Unity/Gnome). It's a vacation weekend and I did describe it as an experiment, so we'll see how long this lasts.

Feel free to ask any questions that come up. I'm a long-time Ubuntu user (since the 8.04 release), and am also in the process of migrating from 10.04 (with GNOME desktop) to 12.04 (with KDE).

Edit:

Unsolicited Tip #1: For web browsing, install either Chromium (from the repository) or Chrome (from the Google site). Main difference between the two is that the Google Chrome version has Flash and PDF integrated into the browser, while the Chromium version does not (Flash requires a plugin, and PDFs open in a separate window instead of in-browser).

Unsolicited Tip #2: Install the dwww package. Gives you access to hyperlinked documentation for all packages currently installed on the system, via a browser based interface (just open localhost/dwww in your browser).

Install kubuntu-restricted-extras as well so she can view media from the Net. If you're comfortable with ssh'ing in to remotely administer, you might like byobu (login with your account, open a terminal, type byobu-enable) for a nice terminal multiplexer interface.