Rescuing my wife’s PC : Knoppix

I’ve spent a good deal of time recently trying to rescue my wife’s  PC which has crashed fairly decisively.

I tried various methods found on the net including tapping strings of commands into the recovery console such as these ones.  These got the b***er to boot up, and I thought all was saved, but when the desktop appeared it just hung with an hourglass pouring sand out for all eternity, and nothing could be  done.

I was pretty certain that running a Windows XP upgrade disk would repair everything (rather than a clean re-install which wipes data).  But half-way through the re-installation it just stuck.  I repeated numerous times and the same thing happened.

It was in the early hours of the morning that I found the solution.  Forget Windows, use Linux.   There is a version that boots from a CD and lets you see and copy all your Windows Data.    I plugged in my USB external hard drive and just dragged all the data onto it.  Well alright, it’s going to take all day to transfer, but at least I’m staring at a screen that’s making progress, while typing away on my Mac.  It’s so much less frustrating than yesterday’s road to nowhere.

So if ever you reach this dire straight and all else has failed, what you need is Knoppix.   Be sure to download the English version (unless you are German of course !).  It’s the one that ends in EN.  I chose the smaller version for a CD rather than a DVD.  I burned the disk image (iso) on the Mac using the disk utility, and then slotted it into the PC.   Hey presto, it booted up a desktop Linux, which isn’t half as baffling as it sounds.  It looks more or less like any desktop.

There are two icons on the desktop, one for the files on the PC’s internal hard drive, and another for my USB hard drive.   One tip,  I had to make the USB drive writable before I could transfer the files onto it.  For this it’s important to close all windows that have the drive open in it.  Then right-click, and tick the permissions boxes to all you to write data to it.   The rest is just drag and drop.

Documents and settings aren’t hard to find, but Outlook’s emails and contacts are more buried.  You need to find location the .pst file which should be under the following path:

\documents and settings\username\local settings\application
data\microsoft\outlook\.

You might have to click ‘view hidden files’ under the view tab in the browser.

Once the data is all backed up, I’ll do a clean reinstall of windows, and then reload all my wife’s documents, pictures and goodness knows what from the back up drive.  I’ll also have to reinstall her version of Microsoft Office and I’m not sure where the product key is…..  I don’t see her using Open Office somehow.

Well that’s it. Hope this is useful to somebody, or at least to myself as a reminder if I ever have to go through this PC hell again.  Moreover, I hope to win some brownie points on the domestic front, which always come in handy.

This entry was posted on July 12th, 2007 and is filed under Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.