using linux to access broken computer

[EpsilonX]

so i've heard that if a computer doesn't work right, you can use linux to go onto your hard drive and retrieve old files? can you do it without burning the OS onto a disc? (like, put it on a thumb drive?)

[LiNuX]

Yeah, you can do that but you'll have to be able to download the OS first and put it onto a thumb drive. Then you turn on your computer and make sure you either go into the boot menu where you'll be able to select your thumb drive OR you go into bios and tell the motherboard which hardware to run first for the OS and then select the thumb drive.

But you'd have to make a partition on your hard drive to install Linux after which you can use it to tunnel through the rest of your pc. This only works if your hard drive isn't what's corrupted. If the windows OS is what's messing up then it's possible. Also when installing, make sure you put it on a partition and not the actual drive your OS is in because it'll just overwrite everything and there goes all the files you're trying to retrieve.

[EpsilonX]

this sounds rather complicated, do you know of like a step-by-step article anywhere that could help?

[LiNuX]

What windows version do you have?

You can google it, something like "dual booting windows xp and centos (or other linux distro)"

And for partitioning, something like "partitioning hard drive for linux dual boot"

plenty of articles come up and they are different based on the OS you have and want to use.

[EpsilonX]

theres one thats XP and the other is 95 or 98, i don't remember

[Charlotte]

well that is what happen to meh before.
my window vista got blue screen of death and at the same time i got a dual boot, that is window vista and ubuntu os.

all i can say was that if you cannot access your window vista, i can still access the file through Ubuntu that is what the best thing about dual boot.

But if your computer are broken or damage or stuff like that, just reinstall windows vista for example, your file actually will not gone. When ya just finished reinstall windows, there will be a folder called windows.old. Windows.old is the thing that keep all your previous personal files and data. So you can still have your files although you reinstall windows os.

[EpsilonX]

well, my XP computer turns on, does this loading screen thing (that has the windows logo) and then the screen goes blue and it restarts.

the other one turns on, but it doesn't do anything, so it tells me to run this scan program, but halfway through the program just kinda stops and it lets me type stuff like a command prompt