Okay, so when it rains, it pours... My DVD writer ceases to write, so I had to buy a new one, which won't get here until Monday, because I'm sure they stamped "please, don't worry about rushing this" on the box.
Then, one day, I was watching the Simpsons, and my big harddrive (the one I put all my non-Windows files on) suddenly seized up and repeatdly went "whirrrr-CLUNK, whirrr-CLUNK" and nothing would work. In fact, my video froze and the computer died and everything was a mess... Oddly enough, I pulled the drive out, flipped it upside down, plugged it back in, and it works again, but now I'm afraid for the safety of my files. 200GB of random junk that I can't bear to part with, all at the mercy of the Clunk. So... Time to burn things to DVD! Woohoo! Oh, wait... The drive's broken.
Well, I can at least copy files off the harddrive, right? Windows Files Sharing for the win! So I share it and access it and... uhm... one of my 3D projects that hasn't been touched in over 3 years wouldn't copy because the file was, according to Windows, "read only or in-use". Since I was only trying to COPY, that error didn't really apply, but that's the message I got. An entire folder I'd long ago labelled "Backup", was this way. (This was the folder of everything I could absolutely NOT ever do without. Everything else was technically replaceable after much bandwidth, but not this.)
Great... Perfect, awesome. Folder locked down, harddrive failing, no DVD burner. So I try Windows Safe Mode! That'll surely unlock any files "in use"! Yes, sir, that it would... But, alas, it failed miserably. Safe Mode with Networking merited the same issues as a normal boot, and the files wouldn't copy, and I was very upset indeed.
I would simply use Linux to attempt to share the harddrive on my network! It was a logical choice, seeing as how Windows was doing something odd. Unfortunately, the Linux LiveCD I had was an old version of Ubuntu, which didn't mount the Windows drives properly and wouldn't let me even read them, much less share them. I didn't have any CDs at the time, and I wasn't prepared to waste another one on a copy of Linux that I was only going to use once and probably throw away next time they updated Ubuntu.
So I remembered a little application called Spin Rite that was supposed to fix all sorts of harddrive issues. So I decided to give it a little test run... To spare you the painful, pointless details, let's just say that after over 30 hours of running this program, it had constantly been trying to correct major, irrecoverable errors and was only 0.030% of the way through the drive. I gave up an canceled the thing, because I now, had a plan!
So yesterday, I went to Best Buy with a mission! To nab me one of these fabled 1GB USB drives with which I was going to make myself an Ubuntu Linux LiveCD... Only on USB. The way I see it... Why should I keep downloading Ubuntu and burning CD after CD, only to download a new version again, burn it, and throw away the obsolete version? Why do that when I could technically make the USB drive bootable and stick Linux on that, and update it when I get a new version downloaded? Anyway, I looked for some USB sticks, prepared to pay exactly 12 dollars for a 1GB drive, like I saw on NewEgg.com. Of course, I had to allow for taxes, but still. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it... a Geek Squad brand 2GB USB drive for 19 dollars. Why, tell me, was the Geek Squad 1GB USB drive 25 dollars? And why was the 4GB USB drive 60 dollars? I'm not sure, but I pulled the thing off the shelf with the intent of making it quite clear that the price was labeled 19 dollars and I wanted it at that price. Luckily, it rang up 19 dollars and I didn't have to throw around my "customer-knows-best" privileges.
This thing was apparently made by SanDisk, so the Geek Squad logo is pure show. Pure annoying show, at that. Tell me, who in this universe actually likes the Geek Squad? I don't, and I actually considered not buying the thing because of it, but it was just too darn cheap to pass up. It had this funky new U3 technology, too, but I uninstalled it, because that wasn't why I wanted it, and I couldn't have it if I wanted to boot off of it.
After an intense day of downloading and reading and Linux command lines and partitioning, I finally got a persistent USB installation of Ubuntu. (Okay, a LiveCD is technically an installation of Linux that is static. Any changes you make are erased when you restart, because it's... well... running from a CD. Now, technically, you can also do that on a USB drive, but since a USB drive is writable, you can set it up to remember any changes you make! Which, unfortunately, was screwed up because the good ol' Ubuntu development team released the latest version with a critical bug that didn't let you do that. Luckily, someone had managed to manipulate the LiveCD so that it would once again remember changes you make... Hopefully, next release of Ubuntu will fix this incredibly serious error.)
The walkthrough I used was from this site. I'd used a bunch of other sites, but they were all variations on this, and when I actually followed the instructions for this walkthrough, everything worked flawlessly. Unfortunately, it requires an existing installation of Linux. Fortunately, this means it can also be a LiveCD. Unfortunately, if you're wanting to use a USB drive to omit the CD, you're still going to use one. Fortunately, I had the previous version of Ubuntu and I was able to use that with minimal work. If you're interested, check out that link. If, for some reason, 30 years from now, you visit this page and the link is down, ask me for it, because I saved it to my harddrive. If I no longer have it, chances are great that this method of installation is no longer used and nobody needs it anymore!
Seriously, it took me all day to get this working properly. Mostly because of all the images I downloaded and extracted and junk. It was a pain and gave me a headache, and my desktop's BIOS was acting incredibly stupid and threw me off several times when it didn't do what it was supposed to do, but I've got a working USB drive now.
After I got it working, I was able to mount the Windows drives properly, and actually share them! The result was that I was actually able to copy the Backup folder to a stable harddrive and everything copied flawlessly, as far as I know. No errors, and everything was readable. Hopefully, that means everything I've put on my computers for the last 7 years has been saved.
However, I still need a new harddrive... and I'm still waiting for the DVD burner to arrive, but, for now, the serious files have been recovered, and I'm happily running Windows again without any further issues. I think, for now, the drive's stable enough to use, but I need to stop using it for sensitive material.
I've also realized that I would immensely enjoy using Ubuntu as a desktop OS if only it would easily support 3D graphics acceleration, and my Audigy soundcard. It may now, I'm not sure, but it didn't used to... At least not easily. I also use my desktop for large, overnight downloads and Skype, because the Audigy is far better quality than my laptop. Although, if I invest in a good USB microphone, I may be able to use my laptop just as easily as I would on the desktop. Also, I use my desktop for piping movies through to my HDTV, and I wouldn't know where to begin that procedure in Ubuntu.