I love it when things work out.
My friend Keith, the jeweler, hosed his Windows XP installation last week. I went over to help him, thinking it would be something simple and I could boot into Safe Mode, fix it, and look brilliant. No such luck. It just would not boot.
With time running short, I had to leave, but promised I would come by this weekend to help him back up his files. He was getting the restore disks from the friend who gave him the computer, but my concern was that he would lose his files (including his website) in the restore process. My plan was to take a Ubuntu Live CD disk over -- the operating system runs right off the CD instead of the hard drive -- and back up his files to an external hard drive for safekeeping. Keith, understandably, wanted to be able to check his e-mail. I held out a small hope that he'd be able to do that, but my understanding of Verizon DSL was that it might be problematic.
The Live CD worked, and remarkably, Keith was able to go online. This was a great solution to his problem -- he could check his e-mail, etc., until he was able to restore his Windows installation. At this point, I was completely prepared to declare victory and move on.
I decided Keith should have a demonstration how to use the Live CD, though. Keith is very intelligent, but he learns better by doing than by watching. So I sat him down and had him start the computer. Then I stopped him -- Windows had starting running CHKDSK. It hadn't done that before. As we watched, me in open-mouthed amazement, the login screen came up and the computer worked as before.
I couldn't take credit. I still don't know what was different about this particular boot cycle. Nonetheless, it worked.
So I'm considering this as my miracle CD, and I'll be making additional copies for future use.
172/365 - 
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