Stealth
05-22-2006, 05:18 AM
Yesterday I was summoned to help fix an XP system that went belly-up - bad enough that the boot-up sequence would produce a Blue Screen of Death. After attempting to boot into recovery mode (which wouldn't let me access the Documents and Settings folder), and reinstalling XP over the current installation yielded no results.
If you should ever come to a situation like this, the solution is very simple, even though a bit unexpected: pack a live Linux distribution. I happened to carry a Debian Cluster Live disc with me, and although it's generally created for servers, it did its job very well. The point is that it was able to read files off an NTFS partition, bypassing all the security settings. Since all the partitions on the system were NTFS, I wasn't able to save them to another partition. Fortunately enough, the disc had K3B (a pretty straightforward DVD-burning program) so data was backed up in less than 20 minutes (after a bit of fiddling with the incompetent recovery console).
In short, if you're planning on doing simple, post-BSOD data recovery, remember to pack a live Linux distro (Knoppix, Debian Cluster, Damn Small Linux... anything). In this case, it's been a life-saver.
If you should ever come to a situation like this, the solution is very simple, even though a bit unexpected: pack a live Linux distribution. I happened to carry a Debian Cluster Live disc with me, and although it's generally created for servers, it did its job very well. The point is that it was able to read files off an NTFS partition, bypassing all the security settings. Since all the partitions on the system were NTFS, I wasn't able to save them to another partition. Fortunately enough, the disc had K3B (a pretty straightforward DVD-burning program) so data was backed up in less than 20 minutes (after a bit of fiddling with the incompetent recovery console).
In short, if you're planning on doing simple, post-BSOD data recovery, remember to pack a live Linux distro (Knoppix, Debian Cluster, Damn Small Linux... anything). In this case, it's been a life-saver.