As I have said time and time again, no operating system is created equal, nor do they present themselves as better than another. Such a statement can be applied to Windows because, hopefully, everyone knows Windows is prone to crashing. If you haven’t backed up your important and even your not-so-important files recently, getting those files back can be a pain…until now.

Note: If you plan on reformatting your system, please refer to Your Universal Guide to Windows (Part 1) before proceeding with this article for necessary download links to free security software. If you are attempting to recover your Windows machine from a crash, it would be wise to access those downloads from another computer and transfer them to an external storage source.

You could use a file recovery program to attempt to get your files back after reformatting, but that doesn’t guarantee you will get them all back and retrieve 100% of the data. If you want a sure fire way to get all your data back, one of your best bets is to use a Linux distribution on a Live CD. If you have never used Linux before, this walkthrough will be a nice introductory to Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is a nice stepping stone for those that have not ventured the Linux path, allowing users to get a feel for the Linux software and even a decent grasp of the Linux command line.

If you do not have an Ubuntu disc or have the ISO downloaded and burned to a disc, visit DistroWatch or the Ubuntu website to download the ISO image and burn it to a disc with ImgBurn or another ISO image writer. Afterwards, follow the instructions to learn how to view your hard drive.

1. Insert your new Ubuntu Linux disc into your CD drive and reboot. Your PC will boot Ubuntu from the disc.

2. A menu will appear with a list of options. Select Try Ubuntu without any changes to your computer and press enter.

3. Allow Ubuntu to boot. At the very top of the screen, you will see a task bar with a number of options. Click on Places and then Computer. This will show you your hard drive as well as other hard drives on your system, if it applies.

4. Double click on your Windows drive to view the contents. If it opens immediately, skip to step 11 and read on. If not, continue on with the next step.

If you receive an “Unable to mount the volume” error, the next few steps will show you how to force the drive to open to view the contents.

5. Click on the Details link on the “Unable to mount the volume” error message, which will include a command line to force the drive to mount. Copy that command line down.

6. Go back to the top taskbar and click on Applications, then Accessories, and then Terminal. This application will allow you to use the Linux command line.

7. In order to force the mount of your hard drive, we will need to change to the administrator mode (Linux terms: root). Type in the following command:

sudo /bin/bash

8. Hard drives are either in NTFS format or Fat32. If you do not know what kind of drive you have, type the follow command:

fdisk -1

9. A directory must be created in order to mount the drive. Use the following command:

mkdir /media/disk

10. The following command is what you will type next, with a slight variation. Where it is bolded, replace that with what you copied down from the error details. This command is for those with an NTFS drive.

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk -o force

If you have a FAT32 drive, use the following command line:

mount -t vfat -o umask=000 /dev/sda1 /media/disk

If you do not know what type of drive you have, refer to step 8 again.

11. If you completed all of the steps correctly, you should be able to see your hard drive contents.

Now would be a good time to have your external hard drive or other storage content with you. Please note that not all external hard drives are compatible with Linux. Please be sure to check to see that yours is.

Explore your hard drive as you normally would on Windows. Assess the amount of space used and how fast Ubuntu is retrieving the data. If you have a lot of data and Ubuntu seems to be lagging some, stop the data retrieval and look at the contents it has acquired. If there are a lot of useless old files, delete them. If there are a lot of .tmp files, delete them. Afterwards, try and read the folder again and do the same.

Once the hard drive has been cleaned and your file have been backed up, congratulations! You can now reformat your hard drive and reinstall Windows!

Hi there.  I thought I might give you a little background on myself before I wrote this blog entry.  My name is Cody “Belthesar” Wilson, and I’m one of the lesser known members of the Geekologist team.  Typically, I sit in the background and am here to give guidance and direction on the way this site moves forward, either technical or otherwise.  You probably won’t see a lot of blog posts from me, but when you do, it’s because, well, I just gotta share something with everyone.

I was raised for the most part in the Windows world (unless you count when I was mucking around in DOS 5 and 6, and my Apple II years, but we won’t bother with those for now.)  4 years ago, I decided I wanted to give Apple a shot and bought a friends Powerbook G4.  I was hooked from there, and became a Mac zealot of sorts.  I did my fair share of Microsoft bashing while as a Windows user, but it certainly increased when I saw “the light”.  So when I tell you that Windows 7, even in its release candidate stage, is the first Microsoft OS I feel not only comfortable, but welcome and enjoy using since I made the switch to OS X, I want you to know exactly what I mean.

Being the Apple fan I am, not only in OS but in hardware, I decided that I would bite the bullet and nuke my XP Boot Camp partition in favor of installing the Windows 7 release candidate (RC).  Given that I have a new Unibody Macbook Pro, I thought I’d give the x64 release aside, as I was tired of not being able to address all of the RAM when I was in the Windows side of things.  The install process worked without a hitch.  After installing the Boot Camp 2.1 drivers for x64 Vista (which also work without any fuss) I had a fully functional Boot Camp compliant Windows 7 install.  This meant it was time to play.

My first impression was the new Taskbar system, which now very much so replicates and expands upon OS X’s Dock.  You can pin applications to the Taskbar and launch them from there, as well as access any running application from it.  Instead of having a text description, the Taskbar now only has the application icon.  It’s important to note that since they have done this, they have removed the “Quick Launch” toolbar for the Taskbar.  Not a problem as this would have been redundant anyway, and the new system works great.  The Taskbar groups windows by application, and hovering over the application’s icon allows you to select which window you want from a labeled preview icon.  All in all, a very comfortable and familiar experience, especially coming from being an OS X user.  The Taskbar has two other really nice features, one of which is the movement and expansion on the “Show Desktop” button.  Formerly located in the Quick Launch toolbar, the “Show Desktop” button now resides on the far right of the Taskbar.  Clicking it has the same functionality as before, but hovering over it fades each visible window into an Aero transparent window pane, allowing you to see your desktop as well as the outline of each open window.  I found it interesting to find that at one point there was a dialog box that had gotten buried in my persistent clicking about and was able to address it in this manner.  Lastly on the Taskbar, the new System Tray is fantastic.  You can now not only choose what icons appear in the tray, but how their notification behavior works.  Also, instead of expanding the System Tray, it brings up another small window like when hovering over application icons on the Taskbar which allows you to select the other hidden System Tray icons.  All in all, easy to use, easy to manage.  Many welcome changes from not only Vista, but from XP, and given that many users are still staunchly avoiding Vista like the plague, I have a feeling this new interface will be different, but welcome to the users that have avoided the switch to Microsoft’s current desktop OS.

Secondly, the modifications to the Vista-introduced “User Account Control” system have made a very annoying and ridiculed feature much less of an annoyance while maintaining the security benefit of user-granted process elevation.  UAC now has a slider that controls just how in depth it’s requests for attention are.  Its default setting seems to be very sufficient by being present, but not unobtrusive.  UAC offers a hyper-paranoid setting for users questioning if they have viruses, or just really like knowing whenever any system change is trying to be made, a little more relaxed setting which still brings up a dialog window whenever a system change is being made but does not lock out or dim the screen (also an added feature for older systems and I’m sure netbooks, who have trouble with the DirectX transparency overlay taking a long time to load), and finally an option to disable UAC completely.  Not being unfamiliar with having to elevate to perform certain tasks since my experience with UAC, I have left it at its default setting.  UAC also learns what tasks you seem to perform on an elevated level and will learn to automatically elevate certain tasks.  These tasks still have the “elevated shield badge” on them in the Taskbar, but have a opposing pattern blue and gold shield coloring versus the Windows patterned shield for elevated processes.

The last feature I’m going to talk about in this article is the Theme system.  Present since Windows 95’s PLUS! Pack, Windows Themes allow you to style your computer’s interface to your liking.  Sorta.  They can change your desktop icons, your border colors, your wallpaper, and your sound set.  And they still do now.  But making and changing themes to suit your style is easier, more intuitive, and more powerful than ever.  Desktop backgrounds no longer require a third-party application to be rotated.  I use the same folder I do in OS X for my backgrounds in Windows 7.  A nicer set of default sound sets are included, so if for some reason Vista’s sounds make you cringe, then there are several other themes you can choose from.  The Aero and Taskbar colors can also be modified.  All things that you could do before, but now have a way of doing them simpler and easier.

All in all, the Windows 7 experience is something I’m truly excited about.  I finally feel that Microsoft has a true contender in the OS market again, and it’s now Apple’s turn to start looking at what Microsoft is doing and learning on how to improve upon it.  While I’m not about to say that Windows 7 is fantastic and I’m a switcher, I now have no problem booting into Windows and feeling like I’m using an alien or antiquated operating system.  For basic users, it’s newly simplified and streamlined interface will be a breath of fresh air.  For power users, those advanced features and organization systems are easily within your grasp.

So alright, Apple.  Microsoft has finally stepped up their game, and they have an OS to rival yours.  Time to step up the Apple experience once again and keep this rivalry going.  Because there’s finally some competition in the desktop OS market again and it’s time to see where innovation takes us next.

Yakuake is a KDE based terminal emulator and I have to say, it’s my favourite terminal application out there! You can set it to run on startup and define a hotkey which allows you to show/hide the terminal window whenever you wish. It’s a really handy tool which has no noticeable effect on my systems performance.

It’s so much quicker than using shortcuts to Terminal. It also looks better. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was used it an action/adventure film, as in DieHard4.0 they used linux, I imagine this is next for the film industry as it does look like a “hackers tool”.

You can install Yakuake and try it for yourself by using the apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install yakuake

Or you can visit the official site for more information! http://yakuake.uv.ro/

Thanks for reading! If you liked this please: follow me.