Way to go VL....

[retired1af]

We had some pretty good storms go through here about a month ago, and took out the transformer right around the corner from the house. As luck would have it, it fried the onboard NIC on the motherboard. No biggey, right? Just go the the parts bin, and snag another NIC.

On a whim, I was digging around Dell's site the other night, and saw that my warranty was still good on the PC. Hmmmmm, says I, I think I'll get the motherboard replaced since it's still under warranty.

Got the bugger replaced yesterday AM, and since I was rushed, didn't really have time to test it, other than to see that it was NOT going to boot into Winderz. **sigh** Ducky, I know what I'm doing when I get home from work.

Get home last night, fire up the box, and instead of selecting the XP install, I want to see if the VL install works. BOOM! Flies right in, fires up, and I still have a working system. PERFECT! Now for the Winderz side. Nada, zilch, zero. Can't even get in. Hmmmmmmmmm, check the BIOS, change the drive setting, and now it boots into XP. But wait.. No keyboard, no mouse, no other USB device is loading. GAH! I feel the first pangs of panic starting to set in, as I'm thinking of things on that partition that I can not loose, and am wondering just how the heck am I going to get it backed up.

Try another restart, and as it's booting, think I can just copy critical data from the NTFS partition into K3B and burn it to a DVD. Panic feeling goes away, and as XP boots, the Plug n Pray system kicks in and starts installing the USB drivers. WHEW! Back to normal.

Guys, if it hadn't been for the VL distro on this system, I'm not sure what I would have done. Sure, things kinda fixed automatically, but if it hadn't been for VL, and it's rock steady performance on this machine, I wouldn't have had that "lifeline" to save the data on the NTFS side of the machine. So, again, I say a job well done, and thank you for a solid performer that will always get more use on this box than Winderz.

[hemuli]

I always keep copy of Puppy linux on CD, it has saved my data dozens of times when XP has freaked out.

BTW, does anyone know any one-floppy distro with USB- and NTFS-support? No X needed.

[Masta]

retired1af,
                 I sure am glad to see that VL was there to save your day, even if you ended up not fully needing it in the end, as things sort of worked themselves out. It's times like this that help you realize just how fortunate you may be to have a VL partition (or even one of the liveCDs).
 I hate to sound somewhat like a nag, but VL is mainly supported (financially) through CD sales, now computer system sales, and of course donations. IF you like VL, and would like to see it progress towards the future, Please consider a donation or a purchase to support VL, so that it can keep supporting back.

[Joe1962]

When my previous laptop died suddenly, I just plugged the HDD in a much older one with pretty different hardware and it just worked. Only thing I had to do was change the xorg driver from ATI to Intel. Then I plugged in a USB drive and saved all my work and stuff.

EDIT: of course, I could have just used mc in text mode to save the stuff, no need to even get the gui going, but then I did want to get some work done while I was borrowing the other laptop...