DesmondA

One of my customers had the misfortune to have a failed hard drive. The immediate symptom was clicking as it tries to boot and then it goes straight into the Linux. The Lilo menu did not appear so no chance of starting in Windows. I rewrote the boot and although that worked it did not last so a new hard drive was ordered. It was important that I made no further attempt to rewrite the boot until a new hard disk was present. The tool I have been using for some years now is Norton Ghost 2003. This runs on DOS and is capable of cloning data from NTFS, FAT and Linux partitions. I used a new 160GB hard disk to replace the old, worn out, 120GB disk. Needless to say I gave the additional space to the Linux. As expected the system when it started did not start correctly and simply gave a screen full of 'grub'. Next I did the install of the present Linux system without reformatting the system partition and was very pleasantly surprised to find the Windows environment restored, with even the Adobe Photoshop CS2 working correctly and, with it's license in place. Unfortunately there was error on the /home partition and I then reformatted that and restored from backup which I made for the purpose. After this experience I going to install the Photoshop on CrossOverOffice? on the Linux side. My purpose in writing this note is to show that when the wind is in the right direction we can end up with totally satisfactory result. Of course every instance of hard disk problems do give us some unexpected difficulties. But, of course the simple precaution is to make backup where possible.