How to Use the Ubuntu Live CD to Recover Files

Robbie Ferguson: You know you’ve got your computer all set up. You’ve got all your files on that computer and all of a sudden you can't boot that computer or you can't get access to that computer. The system here for example all I've done is corrupt one DLL file and now you absolutely cannot turn on this computer. So that could be a big problem for somebody if that happens and if a virus gets into your system and corrupts a particular system file and you don’t how to fix it. It’s really important for us to be able to recover the data off of that hard drive before sending it into technician or unless that technician an old chum who’s going to back up your stuff for you and you trust them. But in the case where let’s say you’ve got a Dell computer and you're sending it away and it’s going to be gone for a few weeks I wouldn’t take my computer into a retail store and have them say, “Oh, yeah, we’ll back up your stuff. Don’t worry about it.” I would need to really trust that technician. Carrie Webb: Right. Robbie Ferguson: What I want on to touch today is now we’ve got that computer with a couple of files on the actual window system and this is a real Windows installation but I've corrupted it so that it doesn’t boot at all. So if you’ve ever seen that before this is a way to get those files of that system. One of the nice things now I've just inserted the Ubuntu live CDs and now is going to boot up from the Live CD just like it would if you were to get this and run at your computer. The first thing you see is what language you would like to use so I'm going to select English and I'm booting this up in the broken windows computer and I'm going to go try Ubuntu with out any changes to your computer. I'm just going to let that boot right up. The beautiful thing about this Carrie is as a Live CD gives us access to networking, gives us access to the internet, gives us access to our USB bus so we can put it an external hard drive. If we’ve got the SATA, we can plug in the SATA drive. It’s another port for an external hard drive but it’s a lot faster than the USB you took right out. So no matter what you want to back up to, it’s available to you from the Live CD. Now, on the other hand if your hard drive is actually physically damaged, if you hear that head slotting back and forth then you definitely need to get that thing and put that into recovery place. Don’t boot that system if at all but this is a case where the software let’s say Windows or maybe you mess something up in Ubuntu Linux playing around and you can't boot your system. This is a way to get in to that system and actually recover those files so that you can reformat or you can start repairing if there is something along those lines. Carrie Webb: You don’t have to have Ubuntu on your system, right? Robbie Ferguson: No, we’re just going to use it as a recovery mechanism. Carrie Webb: So when you say Live CDs, this is what I just picture in my head the computer doing. It’s constantly going back to the CD to get the information because you're not putting it on your hard drive. Robbie Ferguson: That’s right. So we’re not actually going to put any data on the hard drive. We’re just going to extract our data from the hard drive to back it up. You can get your own Live CD absolutely free just by going over to Ubuntu.com. What we want to get is the desktop edition of Ubuntu. So what I love about this is you can do this for many systems so it doesn’t matter what is installed in that computer. You can access the hard drive. You can copy your files to the back up just like we’re going to do here. Using Windows XP is the example but it could be Vista. It could be another version of Ubuntu. It could be VSB or whatever and you’ll be able to do this as well just with the file locations would be different so refer back to our previous installments about the data backup like where you find your documents in Windows XP for example, where you find your documents in Vista and you’ll be able to find those. I've got this booted up now. This is from the Live CD so this is what you're going to see if you boot from the CD itself. Last week actually Carrie somebody asked how he can access for NTSF drive from within Ubuntu and I'm going to actually show you that because I can’t do that last week because I didn’t have a system of Windows XP installed. Carrie Webb: You can just refresh me and review, what’s NTFS? Robbie Ferguson: The Windows NT file system so I basically want to say NTFS I mean a Windows hard drive. Carrie Webb: Okay. Robbie Ferguson: So this particular viewer had Windows installed but also Ubuntu and wanted to be able to open the files that were on his Windows computer, Windows hard drive from within Ubuntu. So if you're watching this is how you actually do that. You’ll see if I go down on my places menu like I was explaining on the show but couldn’t download straight last week. You see my 10.7 gigabyte media that is the hard drive that is in my computer so just a small hard drive in this one but yours will be whatever size it is. So you click on that and it’s going to automatically mount it. it will place on your desktop, there it is. Sometimes it will automatically open it and in some instances you find to reclick on it but in this case it’s probably going to open it up for me, perhaps not so let’s just do that. There it is. So you see that is actually my windows computer so this is documents and settings and things like that so now that we’re into this system, I'm going to bring up another places window. Let’s get something else going. We could plug in as we were saying. We could plug in the USB external drive so if you got a hard drive you can plug that into your system now with Ubuntu booted and it’s going to actually detect that just like you place this hard drive on the desktop. It’s going to put your flash drive or your external hard drive right on your desktop. You can then open it up and you’ve got a place to put the files that you're going to copy of the corrupted windows. Carrie Webb: So even though Windows is broken. Robbie Ferguson: You can't boot that computer at all. Carrie Webb: You can't boot it but put this to scan and it will just start going. Robbie Ferguson: It will boot from the CD into Ubuntu Linux without ever installing itself. Carrie Webb: That’s amazing. Robbie Ferguson: So using this CD we can then like I've shown here mount that hard drive which is currently unbootable with Windows. The other time that this should be really handy and I've had this happen where a client would have a computer to saw massively infected with viruses or spyware that is just dreadfully slow. As an IT or as the repair guy I want to get their stuff back up but I don’t want to do it actually boot into their operating system so in that case even like hand boot the system. It’s so slow from other spyware and stuff that it’s just not worth it so I’ll do this as well even if I could boot that system, I'm going to boot it from the Ubuntu CD and do it this way. So in this case, what don’t I just bring up a network drive. So in this case, let’s go Ctrl-L to open a new location. I'm going to go SMB:// which is the protocol we’re going to use to be able to access a Windows network share so I've got the Windows server on the network. You’ll need to know the IP address of that server I believe. I'm not sure if it would go with name resolution or not and it might. It did so it does take the name resolution so that is good. So you see Windows shares on demo so this is my computer so that I go into the shared folder and as long as I've got right permissions to that folder I actually be able to copy those files over into there. Carrie Webb: What is the right permission and how do you get it? Robbie Ferguson: Well, when you share that folder on your Windows computer you need to actually set a permission so if you're user account is the administrator no problem. Carrie Webb: So can you access files like if you have multiple users on your computer. Can you access files from each user? Robbie Ferguson: Yeah, we’ll get into that for just a moment you’ll see that as far as the layout so I've actually just entered my log in and password for this network share so that’s what you need to do if you’ve got a password on the network share. This is only applicable if you're going to backing up to the network. If you're doing a case where you're backing up to an external hard drive you're not going to have to do any password or anything like that. It’s just going to show up as a hard drive. In this case I'm mounting a network share so it’s a little different but I did want to show you how to use msv://. Alright, so there it is. This is my shared drive. I can create a folder. This is a shared folder through my network connection. This is a separate computer. I've made a folder called backup. I'm going to go over here. You see this, Carrie? Documents and settings and I go in there and I see all the user accounts so this is where you would see Carrie, Robbie or whoever is on that computer. So you go into your folder and back up their files. It’s just like you would see on Windows so back up their favorites, right click on favorites and copy it, go back to your back up here and paste that. This is now saving it through my network connection to a network location. Documents same thing, if you’ve documents that you want to save. You can see that even though I couldn’t boot that computer before I can actually bring up the files that are on that computer, on the Windows partition so in this case let’s back up my documents as well, copy that. That’s really all you that need to know because if you're using that external back up drive or flash card, you just plug it in and when you're done you just basically you tell Ubuntu, “Okay, I'm done.” I'm going to system, shut down and that’s going to turn off your computer. You can eject your Ubuntu CD or the Live CD. You should download it for free so it’s a very nice tool to have it. This is absolutely free. Carrie Webb: Yeah. Robbie Ferguson: And then if I looked at my demo system and see if I can find it. So this is actually my Linux system so my msv share was actually on here but you’ll see on my desktop is the actual shared folder called ‘shared’ and in that folder is now backup. I've turned off the Windows computer and you see that I've got my documents and my favorites. If you go into my documents and my pictures you see there is that picture that I have just back up from that Live CD. So now I can feel safe to reformat the computer, reinstall Windows XP. I'm not going to worry about it because I back up all my stuff. So make sure you do refer back to the previous episodes on data backup so that you know where the files are that you want to back up. If you’ve got Outlook Express, if you’ve got multiple Firefox and you want to back up your bookmarks and things like that it’s very important that you back up everything but essentially documents and settings you're going to find all your stuff and as long as you back that up you can be pretty safe to go. Carrie Webb: It’s good to know. I've just learned so much. That’s fantastic. Robbie Ferguson: Cool.