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I bet you must have seen the blue screen of death if you have use Windows long enough. It is what happened to your PC or notebook when you don’t know what to do next. Should you call the technical team from the shop you bought your PC? Or call anybody who know how to get rid of the problem? Or maybe contact Uncle Gates from Micro$oft support?

When I encountered the problem while I was really naive few years back, the best bet would be to restart my notebook. If it does not changed anything, I will call my friend who “seems” to know what to do (unfortunatley he does not). At last, I have to reinstall my Window$ with the recovery cd that comes with my notebook.

The not-so-good about reinstalling Window$ was that I lost almost all my data on the hard disk. When reinstalling, Window$ installer will wipe your hard disk clean before it installed the “new” copy of Window$. It bugged me very much, until I found a temporary solution to save my data from the “crashed” hard disk - accessing the hard disk WITHOUT WINDOW$.

Linux Live CD

The extraordinary features about Linux Live CD are:

1. It can access your hard disk when your Window$ commit suicide. It does not matter if you have FAT32 or NTFS file systems in your hard disk.
2. It is free.
3. You can use it as your own recovery cd. Choose the smallest, easiest and user friendly Linux distro and burn it on a cd. In this review, I prefer to use SLAX Linux.

SLAX Linux

SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14″) CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. It means that using SLAX, you can do your work in your PC or notebook without the need of a hard disk.

Howto:

1. Download your copy of SLAX Linux from SLAX homepage. It is available as an ISO image of the cd. It fits on small 8cm CD-R(W). Burn it with your favorite cd-writing software.
2. As you downloaded ISO image is quite big (around 200MB), I would suggest that you check for the integrity of your ISO image. Each file for download has it’s own md5sum. This checksum is used for several purposes, the most common is to assure your download wasn’t corrupted. When md5sum of your downloaded file is different than the one published at these pages, then you can be 100% sure your file is wrong. So, every time you download a file which is big, use md5sum software to create (generate) the checksum of your file and compare it with the one published at the download page.
3. If you have successfully downloaded and burn a copy of SLAX Linux in a cd, you need to tweak your PC or notebook so that it can boot from a cd. When you restart your PC or notebook, press whichever key you are told is needed to enter setup of BIOS (mine is F2).
4. You’ll need to change your system’s boot order in the BIOS. In the Boot section you should then be able to adjust the settings labeled Boot Order, Boot Device Priority or possibly some other variation on this wording. Make sure that your CD/DVD drive is set to be your first boot device and you should be able to boot from a CD.
5. Put in your newly burned SALX Linux cd, and restart your PC. Your PC should be able to detect the cd and boot from it. Successful booting will end you up on this page:
6. To access your files in your hard disk, just click “System” > “Storage Media”. You should be able to see and access your drive C: from here.
7. If not, you may need to “mount” the drive by right clicking on your drive C:, and then select “mount the drive”. But most probably, you won’t have to do this.
   
8. You should be able to see your hard drive content from here. If you decided to do a backup for your precious data, get a portable pen drive and copy your data inside it.

For advance user, SLAX Linux may not be able to give more, apart from recovering files from the hard disk. They may want a boot cd that could do more than just accessing their machine, like for example diagnostic tools and antiviruses. Ultimate Boot CD may suits the need of an advance computer user.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 5:29 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.