what you are about to read actually happened. only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. however, since there wasn't anyone who was innocent, no names have actually been changed.
i got a phone call from my friend stephen the other day. one of his roommates, a writer, had lost access to their manuscript. it had been saved on some floppy disks (yes, that's a silly thing to do, but she's a writer not a technician) in several files and now every time she tried to access it on her windows machine it just said that the floppy needed to be formatted. she had tried other computers and got the same message on all of them. apparently she was a little freaked out. steve asked if i might be able to help since "linux can do anything, right?" i said "no promises, but sure, send her over and we'll see what we can do."
she arrived at 09:30, flustered with floppies in hand. since my laptop doesn't have a floppy, i fired up the desktop machine that runs suse 10.1. she asked how long it would take and i told her i didn't know. best case scenario: the system would simply be able to access the floppy properly. less good scenario: we could do a direct disk copy via dd and do some manually poking about in the resulting blob of data to see if we could find her manuscript, or at least parts of it. she looked pensive.
i slotted the disk, opened up konqi and navigated to the floppy drive. there were all her files. i copied them to the hard disk and opened one of them up to see if they were intact. they were. she cheered and became chatty (apparently her happy state). she burbled about linux being cool and how her windows machines sucked and how cute my cats were and oh, was that a picture of my son?
the floppy disk did have actual problems: a few files wouldn't copy over. but they were just temporary files that word makes so no data was lost. apparently this corruption is what was keeping her microsoft windows machines from being able to read her microsoft word files. irony. thankfully we have linux. i don't think it was lost on her that if she'd had kde on linux, she'd have been able to do the same thing i did. point, click, voila.
our 5 minute recovery session complete, i zip'd them up via the right click menu, sent them to my laptop via fish:// (that impressed her =), and then emailed them to her gmail account. she left with a smile on her face (and an admonition not to use floppies for something so important) saying she was going to celebrate the afternoon with a little recreational drug use and some hard core manuscript editing. ah, those crazy writers.
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13 comments:
If I was on the edge of losing a 100,000 word manuscript, I think I'd want to take the edge off with a little recreational drug use too!
Good save.
I remember how hard I adviced not to open the .doc or .xls files directly from the floppy (but copy to the HDD) when talked to students in my dormitory a few years ago.
They werent sure I am serious and then... one by one kept loosing their files.
So when are you going to install her KDE? :)
why hasn't anyone made a text editor that allows you to save in two locations at the same time? :(
hey a kde suggestion! ;)
I work in a computer shop and using linux to do that kind of job is frequent; but more often for harddrives than floppies.
Well, I think there are plenty of stories like this - I think everyone who is a bit more a kind of a geek can report at least one of these stories :D
Here my one, a bit shortened:
On a black board of my home university was a paper of someone desperately searching for a computer geek because his diploma thesis (what you have to do after 5 years of study in Germany) was lost.
I called him to check if it an interesting case, and the situation was this: Laptop crashed somehow, no reboot into the system, so he tried to reinstall Windows XP (two times!) but nothing there.
Well, for me the job was pretty easy: a live CD (Suse, I guess) showed my the system (three partitions, each with its own windows installation), and we were able to find the data. A fish:// copied the data over the LAN to my main machine (a bit slow, but I was to lazy to set up a ftp which would probably have been faster due to the not needed encryption), and from there I burned everything to a DVD.
As a result he was very impressed, I explained a bit what Linux is, what Free Software and why he should keep it in his mind at least a bit - and I asked him to be nice to two other people if once he meets someone who also desperately needs help. Makes the world a bit better, I hope.
And that is just the last, biggest story, there were plenty of other stories when I worked as a volunteer help desk for a student network.
I'd still say that recreational drug use and hard core manuscript editing is better than the other way around.
I've said it before, you are a STUD! Don't you see that she was turned on by your geek ability?! Any tips for aspiring geek/studs?
Yap, this has happened to me also several times. But not only with windows.
Last month I've recovered the database of two hotels that were on one disk under Novel Netware version 4 something. Used dd to copy the raw data and then mounted the disks. They had un-backed up data since 1998! Novel couldn't read the disks...
Many, many stories of this are abound. In fact, anyone who has used Linux will probably be able to tell this story. I've even had people who've burned CDs that could no longer be read, that could be read under Linux.
Using Word does make recovery of files difficult though. The format all Office files use does some strange things, as the Samba people can probably confirm.
I know I probably shouldn't be pointing this out, but it's pretty likely that her original problem was a hardware problem, not a software one.
Floppy drives need to be tracked correctly in order to read a disc, and that tracking can move over time. The symptom is that a disc that was fine suddenly becomes unreadable and needs formatting; once formatted it then works ok again.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't keep that under your hat... ;-)
Great story. I even experienced this problem with a FAT32 partition on my HD once. It wouldn't read in Windows anymore, but Linux had no problem mounting and accessing it.
Heh, what a funny introduction. :-)
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