August 26, 2003
Mindreading computers
OK. So the Matrix is definitely upon us. After placing my order for a TiBook yesterday, my not-so-trusty-anymore Compaq Evo n600c laptop decided to stop booting, figuring he would be going out of service anyhow. So here I am, stuck with a failed harddrive, and the friendly lady from the Compaq CarePaq center unwilling to confirm they will be doing any effort at all to rescue my data. As we have seen a few weeks ago, CarePaq service is pretty good at replacing faulty components on-site, but won't go through the trouble of mounting the tiny laptop drive as a second drive on a working machine in order to rescue data. Since it's a read failure in one of the Windows boot files, I'm confident that the rest of my data is still there - but the rescue of these data files is in the hands of the service engineer who is supposed to show up tomorrow. I'll just keep fingers crossed, since I can't do much else anyhow.
Comments
You could try grabbing a copy of the Knoppix bootable linux CD. If your laptop will boot off it, it should give you access to the hd and to the network. You can then just scp/ftp your files to a safer location....
Posted by: Andrew at August 26, 2003 11:51 AM