When my laptop hard drive died (from overheating - again) I tried everything I could think of to get the data off it. I froze it, hit it, banged it on the desk, turned it upside down - all the usual tricks. Nothing worked at all. Whether I put it in the laptop or used a USB enclosure, I just couldn't get to the drive.
I decided that since I was going to have to reinstall everything from scratch anyway, I may as well try Ubuntu - Ryan had been hounding me to install it for a while. It was a breeze to install, and I could even sit there playing games while it installed - beat that, Microsoft!
Anyway, after a minor niggle with the wlan not supporting WPA-PSK (which is resolved), everything seems to be working fine - Compiz gives me graphical effects which Windows wouldn't be able to perform nearly as well on the processor (Compiz even did it fine when the CPU was locked at 600MHz). There is only one exception - the built-in (well, more like butchered-up PCMCIA) SD/MMC/MS reader doesn't work.
Anyway, back to the "dead" hard drive. I decided to have another crack at it today. I tried putting it back in the laptop and manually setting the drive parameters in the BIOS, since it detected it, but as a 0MB drive. One problem - the BIOS on this machine doesn't allow manual parameter input - it's auto-only. So, on a whim, I slapped it back in the USB enclosure - and plugged it into the laptop with Ubuntu running. Ubuntu picked up the drive and automounted it - and I immediately had full access to both partitions on the drive. I have now copied off everything I think I might want/need from it that I don't have elsewhere - it was running for upwards of half an hour with no problems. I could probably just keep running it as a USB HDD under Ubuntu with no problems - but I'd rather not risk it, so it's just going to sit around in case I find the need for something else off it.
Overall summary: Ubuntu beats Windows hands-down (after a bit of setup, but hey - Windows takes longer to install and also requires tweaking to get decent performance).
I decided that since I was going to have to reinstall everything from scratch anyway, I may as well try Ubuntu - Ryan had been hounding me to install it for a while. It was a breeze to install, and I could even sit there playing games while it installed - beat that, Microsoft!
Anyway, after a minor niggle with the wlan not supporting WPA-PSK (which is resolved), everything seems to be working fine - Compiz gives me graphical effects which Windows wouldn't be able to perform nearly as well on the processor (Compiz even did it fine when the CPU was locked at 600MHz). There is only one exception - the built-in (well, more like butchered-up PCMCIA) SD/MMC/MS reader doesn't work.
Anyway, back to the "dead" hard drive. I decided to have another crack at it today. I tried putting it back in the laptop and manually setting the drive parameters in the BIOS, since it detected it, but as a 0MB drive. One problem - the BIOS on this machine doesn't allow manual parameter input - it's auto-only. So, on a whim, I slapped it back in the USB enclosure - and plugged it into the laptop with Ubuntu running. Ubuntu picked up the drive and automounted it - and I immediately had full access to both partitions on the drive. I have now copied off everything I think I might want/need from it that I don't have elsewhere - it was running for upwards of half an hour with no problems. I could probably just keep running it as a USB HDD under Ubuntu with no problems - but I'd rather not risk it, so it's just going to sit around in case I find the need for something else off it.
Overall summary: Ubuntu beats Windows hands-down (after a bit of setup, but hey - Windows takes longer to install and also requires tweaking to get decent performance).
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