Have you ever had that bsod and os crash when you are in the middle of something very important like finishing office reports or presentation? There is a way you can quickly go into damage control mode and finish off he work and/or copy the files to other pc/notebook without going through os reinstall or removing the hdd.
LiveCD:
A Linux live cd is a bootable cd that has dual personality
1. Operating system installer
2. Boot into the os quickly without installing the os.
Where to get a liveCD:
Live cd’s from most of the Linux distros are available and the ones that I prefer are:
1. Ubuntu 9.10
2. Linux Mint
3. Fedora 12
Insert the livecd in the cd/DVD drive and you will get the boot menu as shown below:
The boot process may take few minutes as it has to boot from cd.
After booting the OS from Live CD, you will get a desktop that is similar to KDE desktop and windows users should feel familiar to use.
Using Mint:
Once you boot into Mint, the partitions on the hdd will be accessible from Menu –> Computer
In this case, “100Gb Hard Disk: System†is my windows partition. Select the drive that you want to access/mount and the drive will be mounted and icon will be placed on desktop.
Applications required for doing basic tasks are already available like openoffice, kblogger.
The image below shows the content of my windows NTFS volume that is accessed using “My Computerâ€
Here an example PDF file opened using Live CD’s PDF reader:
In case the partitions are not mounted, you can open shell (Menu –> Terminal)
and you can try something like this:
Let’s think that the NTFS volume that has windows in it is /dev/sda0 (first harddrive, partition 1)
1. Sudo su - ( administrative mode / root mode)
2. Fdisk -l ( check the partition layout and fond the right partition to mount)
3. Mkdir /win( directory to mount the partition to)
4. Mount /dev/sda1 /win ( mount the drive to /win)
You can now access your data by going to /win
The beauty here is that you can copy the content from the volume that contains windows to any other volume or to any other hard drive and go ahead with the reimage of windows (if reimage is the only option) without fearing the loss of data that was stored in active partition (windows partition). Nowhere will it feel like you are running an OS from a CD (just that the interface will be a bit slow)
LiveCD:
A Linux live cd is a bootable cd that has dual personality
1. Operating system installer
2. Boot into the os quickly without installing the os.
Where to get a liveCD:
Live cd’s from most of the Linux distros are available and the ones that I prefer are:
1. Ubuntu 9.10
2. Linux Mint
3. Fedora 12
Insert the livecd in the cd/DVD drive and you will get the boot menu as shown below:
The boot process may take few minutes as it has to boot from cd.
After booting the OS from Live CD, you will get a desktop that is similar to KDE desktop and windows users should feel familiar to use.
Using Mint:
Once you boot into Mint, the partitions on the hdd will be accessible from Menu –> Computer
In this case, “100Gb Hard Disk: System†is my windows partition. Select the drive that you want to access/mount and the drive will be mounted and icon will be placed on desktop.
Applications required for doing basic tasks are already available like openoffice, kblogger.
The image below shows the content of my windows NTFS volume that is accessed using “My Computerâ€
Here an example PDF file opened using Live CD’s PDF reader:
In case the partitions are not mounted, you can open shell (Menu –> Terminal)
and you can try something like this:
Let’s think that the NTFS volume that has windows in it is /dev/sda0 (first harddrive, partition 1)
1. Sudo su - ( administrative mode / root mode)
2. Fdisk -l ( check the partition layout and fond the right partition to mount)
3. Mkdir /win( directory to mount the partition to)
4. Mount /dev/sda1 /win ( mount the drive to /win)
You can now access your data by going to /win
The beauty here is that you can copy the content from the volume that contains windows to any other volume or to any other hard drive and go ahead with the reimage of windows (if reimage is the only option) without fearing the loss of data that was stored in active partition (windows partition). Nowhere will it feel like you are running an OS from a CD (just that the interface will be a bit slow)