My laptop is in dire need of an OS refresh. It takes forever to do just about anything. It's a real pain in the ass. I keep putting it off because backing everything up, making a list of things to re-install, then actually doing it and then re-installing all the apps takes a long time.

My external hard drive was getting full, too. 155gb and I had something like 13mb free. Now that a lot of tv seasons are over, (which I was waiting for) I made preparations to start backing things up to DVD. I did that this morning and had a few folders with 4.3gb in each that would fit on a DVD. I fired up Nero and it crashed. I fired it up again, and it crashed. I tried to uninstall Nero and the control panel applet crashed. Things were a bit flakey, so I shut down and restarted the computer. This is a fairly fresh install, by the way. just a few weeks old. so when I restarted, it crashed out again. I started to do a little further investigation, and realized that my F: Drive (BigDog) was saying it was Local Disk (F:) Odd.... I tried to open it and windows crashed. uh-oh.

A few little tests and it was confirmed: Bigdog was toast. With 150gb of data on it. I went looking in my downloads folder for a recovery utility, and of course they all boot from DOS... which means I need a diskette. Who the hell has diskettes anymore? Computers arent even coming with them anymore, you have to buy it and pay extra.

SO, I'm trying something new, while I wait for some floppy diskettes (Johnny Rotten is in town and picking me up some so I should get em in a couple hours). Im downloading a disk image of Knoppix. Knoppix is a flavor of Linux that's designed to boot and run entirely from your CD drive. It comes with the Linux kernel, KDE and then a buttload of applications on it, including data recovery tools for other OSes. There was an article I read online last week (I cant remember where or I'd post a link) about using it for windows system recovery, so Im going to give it a shot. It can't hurt, the data is already lost, right?

I unthrottled my BitTorrent client so Im downloading it at 150KB/sec, to the detriment of everyone else trying to use my network. :)

I'll post up how it worked and any snags I run into here later... what a great way to spend a weekend! (not)