Monday, October 6, 2014

Mint Saves the Day: Linux vs. Windows

I haven't written anything for a while.  I think I have missed a few Fedora releases since my last post. Currently, I am running Fedora 20 64 bit with KDE.  I am not against other distributions and actually I recently used Linux Mint to rescue data on one of my home computers.

The computer was actually my son's box.  He was running W7 at the time.  His main hard-drive developed a glitch and became unreadable.  I took an extra SATA drive and loaded Mint.  I was able to rescue his critical data to a back-up drive.  He ran Mint for a few weeks until he could purchase a new and larger drive.  After he installed W7 on the new drive, I transferred is data to the new drive.  And since he is a W7 guy, Mint went back on the shelf awaiting another opportunity to save the day.

I tried to install Fedora to his computer but it didn't take.  Mint had no problem installing and reading the old drives.  I was actually surprised. And, he was actually able to continue with his video editing on Mint while waiting for his new drive.  Mint truly saved the day.

This brings up topic.  Why can Linux read drives that Windows rejects?  Since I am not a hacker (or a cracker) I have no idea how to answer that.  What I do know is if a NTFS partition becomes unreadable, Linux may be able to read and recover the data.