I’ve mentioned before how spiffy Ubuntu linux is. I’ve now found a great use for the live CD (the CD you can boot from to try the OS without installing it): recovering data from a toasty NTFS hard drive.

My friend, Brian, has a HP laptop and his hard drive gave up the ghost. I could view the drive using NTFS Reader, but it would blow up when I attempted to copy the files to another drive. I tried a number of data recovery software packages but got no love.

The data was there, but the partition was toast. You couldn’t even fdisk the damn thing because the sectors where the partition info lives were hosed. I tried to repair the partition using some MS tools, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, I put his drive in an external USB enclosure, added another external USB drive formatted with FAT32, and booted up my laptop using the Ubuntu Live CD. Ubuntu saw both the damaged drive and the FAT32 drive, and I was able to copy the files from the GUI (Gnome) by simply doing drag and drop (I needed a FAT drive to write to… linux can read NTFS, but not write to it).

After recoving my friends 7.5GB of digital photos and a few media files, I burned them off to DVD and then attempted to fix the partition, but that was a big ol’ no-go. My friend is very damn happy, and I learned something new.

Life is once again sweet.