Last night, I had one of those experiences that makes me really wonder how the average person manages to get stuff done with computers. As you know, the old laptop had some water poured on it, and ceased it’s functioning. I was pretty sure that the hard drive was still fine, so I ordered a connector to enable me to hook it up to a regular IDE cable, in order to extract the information off of it - stuff that hadn’t been backed up to an external device recently.

So, I hook the hard drive up to the Windows 98 machine, and Win98 didn’t recognize it. At the time, I thought it was jumper related (I don’t have any jumpers that will fit a laptop harddrive) and so I thought that I wouldn’t be able to hook it up to the desktop. I’ve since revised that assessment, and I think the reason was that it is NTFS formatted. I honestly thought that it was FAT, but that’s really immaterial to the story.

So anyway, instead, I hooked it up to the external HD enclosure, and connected it to the laptop via firewire to attempt to copy the files over. Small problem - the profile directories are protected by NTFS security, and XP Home has no way to override those security settings, other than dropping into Safe mode (no external HD access then…)

Fortunately I knew that Linux would let me do what I needed, so I downloaded an iso of Knoppix and burned it, managed to get into Linux without too much trouble. Well - there was the fact that I couldn’t copy files from the old drive to the new one, because it’s unable to write to NTFS drives, but I just hooked the external drive up to the old desktop, popped in the CD, and copied away (at a very slow rate.)

Tonight is the moment of truth, when I try to copy the files over to the laptop :)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “If something’s hard to do then it’s not worth doing.” - Homer