I woke up yesterday to the wonderful sound of my harddrive failing.
That and because I was sweating into my bed.
Right now it's la canicule here in France, which is a fancy way of saying unbelievably hot. So when I woke up to computer troubles, well, I knew it was going to be an annoying day.
After a groggy look at my BIOS settings and seeing the same error again and again, it became clear that I at least needed a Windows 7 install disk if I wanted to boot up my computer.
The boot sector was corrupted.
Problem is I received this computer with Windows 7 preinstalled and without an install disk. I figured I'd see if the computer store had a disk I could buy or if they had another fix I could use.
A hot walk to the computer store gave me an estimate in the hundreds of euros if I needed a new harddrive. I didn't think that was it, and the clerk gave me the great of idea of running a linux liveDVD to see if the files were still there.
Bought a DVD, burned a disk for the first time in years and.... all my files were there! I quickly backed up everything and started trying to get a Windows 7 disk to get my computer up and running.
In the middle of searching I started wondering why I even needed it. I could just install Ubuntu from the liveDVD!
So I did it.
And it was the first time I'd used Ubuntu since 2008. Boy has it improved. I mean (most) things actually worked without any noodling around in the terminal! Including sound!
I'm enjoying Ubuntu 14.04 now. Best of all it's running better than Windows 7 ever ran on this machine.
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