OS X is PROOF linux that sucks! 17101

snips

On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 23:05:58 -0600, Oxford

"None has completelet failed in several years". Well, lucky you. I've got 2 40Gb IBM drives - both toast. A 30Gb Maxtor - toast. Several WDs - toast. I've got SCSI drives which are toast, IDE drives which are toast, and I think I've even got one of the old Seagate MFM drives which is toast thanks to the infamous "stiction" problem. 1

On average, I see about one drive a month that needs data recovery done on it. Some of those are because the drive is faulty, some because the OS hosed itself and took the filesystem with it, others for other reasons.

Take a laptop I worked on for a client. XP. They took it to a meeting to take minutes. Plugged it into a docking station, took all their notes, brought it back to the office and... nothing. Wouldn't boot.

It wouldn't boot XP. It wouldn't boot in safe mode. It wouldn't even boot off its recovery CD. Every attempt to make it boot to Windows had the same result: it would start the bootup process, get a few seconds into it, and either freeze or reboot itself - I don't recall, offhand, which.

Note that it *would not boot off the recovery CD*. You couldn't even use that to reparbreastion, reformat and reinstall, had you been so inclined, and forget trying to recover the data using the OS CDs.

On the other hand, a Linux LiveCD - Knoppix, to be precise - was very handy. Booted off that just fine, copied the data across the LAN, deleted the entire parbreastion and reinstalled XP.

Another drive, for a different client, was having repeated read failures; not surprising, the drive was dying. In fact, it was dying so badly that you couldn't read more than a couple megs before it would simply stop reading. Again, using a LiveCD - rather than trying to boot off the drive itself - was the solution; while tedious, the system could be rebooted, you could copy another few megs, then repeat the process until you got the data off it that was worth saving.

This crap about all you need it is a net connection is just that - crap; these systems could not be rescued that way. In the case of the second one, you could drop in a new HD, install the OS to it, then use that to recover - by going through the same reboot, copy, reboot, copy process - but why bother? That's an extra chunk of time - an hour? more? - spent doing nothing to actually accomplish the goal, but being billed to the client who is eminently capable of installing the OS themselves; doing it your way would simply be cheating them out of extra money - and on the first system above, it wouldn't work anyway; the drive was physically fine, but the OS was hooped, and you wouldn't dare reinstall the OS and risk the data, not if you're the slightest degree competent.

Whether it's data recovery, or being able to use *your* preferred desktop setup and tools, regardless of what's installed on the machine, or being able to hand someone a disk to boot from so they can experience the system without having to commit to a full install, LiveCDs time and again prove their worth. If you can't see the value, that's your problem. Many of us can.