Posted 10/30/2009 - 18:27 by State68
I occasionally do a bit of tech support work. It's well paid, and relatively stress free and straightforward. Usually.
A couple of weeks back a client asked me to have a look at his Dell Vista box. It was running slowly - the usual things; Spyware, cluttered registry, a load of old temp and swap files - so I set to cleaning it up. It soon became apparent that the OS was well behind the times in terms of updates, so I started going through those, too.
Everything was going swimmingly until we got to (the usually pretty seamless and worthwhile) Vista Service Pack 1. I set it installing via Windows Update and went home, asking the client to call me when it had finished. He called me later that evening. "The screen is black", he said, "with weird flickering white text on it".
Uh-oh.
What followed was a weekend of finding out far more about Windows Vista then is healthy. It wouldn't boot from the harddrive, and it wouldn't even boot from the original install DVDs. Safe mode didn't work, neither did the various restore options available. We couldn't even get into the harddrive to get the files off.
Just when I started to contemplate pulling the harddrive out of the machine and mounting it as a slave in another PC, I came across the magical SystemRescueCd. This is a lightweight Linux distribution that can boot you into a Linux command line, from where you can mount a failing harddrive and get your files off it - or, in my case, get into the guts of Vista and fix the damn thing.
Vista 0, Linux 1.
