ID:36399
 
Say you have a computer that won't boot up. Maybe the OS is corrupt, or the motherboard has popped capacitors, or whatever. The user wants to salvage whatever files can be salvaged from the hard drive. If the problem is with the motherboard, you may try to put the hard drive in another PC -- assuming it has the right kind of connectors -- but you still might face the aforementioned corrupt OS, or the computer itself may refuse to boot because the hard drive has an OS that was tailored to a specific manufacturer's computer.

Puppy Linux to the rescue! It boots from a CD without disturbing the contents of whatever hard drive you have hooked up. The desktop's Connect icon lets you get on the network and do your Internet and/or local network browsing. The Drives icon lets you see the available drives and mount them with one click. (Hard drives, CD readers, flash drives, et al., stay inert in Linux until you tell them to become active.) The menu->network->LinNeighborhood option lets you add a Windows machine with shared drives -- enter the IP address, click Query, do a Scan as User or whatever it's called, and you have access to a shared Windows drive.

As you can see from the above paragraph, there is a little bit of a learning curve, but once you know what to click, everything is quick and (so far) painless. Today I rescued files from two different hard drives -- one set I copied to a shared network drive, the other to a flash drive. After decades of hating and fearing computer hardware (and networking, and pretty much anything that wasn't pure creation of code ex nihilo), I'm finally starting to enjoy it! Of course, it helps to have access to a never-ending supply of worn-out PC's that you can experiment upon without fearing the repercussions.
Gratz =)
Ubuntu can be booted from the CD though. Is there a difference in the uses (bare in mind, I know about as much as Linux as I do about -some witty comment about understanding the opposite sex-) between Ubuntu and Puppy?.
Tiberath wrote:
Ubuntu can be booted from the CD though. Is there a difference in the uses (bare in mind, I know about as much as Linux as I do about -some witty comment about understanding the opposite sex-) between Ubuntu and Puppy?.

I haven't tried Ubuntu, but it's probably fine. I just found Puppy Linux because I wanted a really small OS that might have a chance of running on my 32 MB Windows 95 laptop. (It doesn't, but oh well.) Also, I just like the idea of a full-featured operating system that's specifically designed not to be bloated.
Ohh, well Ubuntu isn't a fully featured operating system that isn't designed to be bloated.

Forgive me, I'm in one of those, 'I just fell asleep during the day and woke up about an hour ago to be even more tired than when I started' moods. I hate day-sleeping.