Ubuntu saves the day!

Last night I was tasked with extracting some data from an unbootable Windows XP desktop. Now I know there is hardware out there that would have allowed me to pull the hard drive and mount it on another PC, but my goal was to mount the computer from a bootable CD or USB drive. What I hoped would be a fairly easy thing, turned out to be so painful that I opted for a simpler approach.

Let me start off by apologizing to the Windows gods because my solution involved Open Source a copy of Ubuntu 7.04. You heard me correct….an open source Linux based operating system was used to save my XP data.

It was a really sad evening to realize that it took me longer to read the instruction on how I MIGHT be able to create a Vista boot disk, then it did to download the 650mb ISO, burn it on to a cd, boot to Linux, open up a NTFS partition and copy 4GB of data to my local NAS.

I love Microsoft.NET, but there is something special about a fully functional OS that fits on a single CD!