Recovering Locked Files
My Uncle dropped off his old computer last week to see if I could get some files off of it for him. He has been using the Hackintosh I built for him for roughly 2 months now, and he figured it would be a good time to migrate all of his old works files to it. However, the problem was that this system had crashed before, and was fixed using a ghost drive – in other words, the C: drive wasn’t what the computer was booting off it, therefore there were some issues with the OS giving permission to allow the files to be copied. Additionally, the system was Windows 2000, so that made it even more troublesome. After turning the system on and booting into Windows 2000, I plugged in the external hard drive that I was going to use for the backup, and although it showed up in the device manager, it failed to show up in “My Computer”. After a quick restart (I wasn’t sure if Windows 2000 supported plug-and-play), I still could not access the external drive. I wasn’t in the mood to waste my time – it was time to try Ubuntu.
I grab the Ubuntu CD closest to me – Ubuntu 8.1. I pop the disc in the drive, and begin the boot process. I’m immediately shown an error message that the BIOS of the system fails to the cutoff (2000) – the BIOS is showing a year of 1997. I think my Uncle waited a little too long on this one. Anyway, Ubuntu tries to boot, but hangs on the load. Alright, as I recently found out, the system is over 10 years old – maybe the hardware is too dated for this version. I go back to Ubuntu 6.1. It starts loading, and again, it hangs. Now I have a problem – I only use Ubuntu Linux, or derivatives of it, and have no clue which distribution to turn to. After a quick Google search, I have 2 alternatives – Desktop Light Linux (DeLi Linux for short) and Damn Small Linux (DSL). Both of these distributions are supposedly better with older hardware – this system had a Pentium MMX (that is not a typo, there was no number attached to this CPU) at 200 MHz, and 96 MB of RAM.
After downloading DeLi, I burnt it to a CD and popped it in. This time we were able to get to a command line – apparently there was no GUI for DeLi. After messing around in the command line for a little to get accustomed to it, I tried to mount the hard drive. Unfortunately, the mount commands didn’t work because there was no defined mount point, and making stuff like that up doesn’t really work for the OS. Next up was DSL. Again, it was burnt and popped into the system. Finally, I was greeted with a GUI, and the ability to poke around a little bit. After checking what programs the Live CD came with, I found a file manager that allowed to me mount the appropriate hard drive, and copy it to wherever I pleased. However, the external hard drive was still not showing up properly, so I had to use a flash drive to copy the files off. I then copied the files onto one of my Uncle’s flash drives using my desktop, and gave them back to him. In the end, it took 4 different Linux distributions and 3 hours to recover 80 MB of data.