Mandriva Linux Used to Save a XP Professional PC

I will admit it, I like tabloid-like headlines. While these types of headlines are trite and irritating to many, they do get attention. Thus the title of this article is intended to grab attention. If you are reading this because the headline got your attention, you can see it worked.

I recently had to recover data from a very sick Dell Dimension computer running Microsoft XP Professional at one of our client sites. As usually happens in these cases Windows had chewed its’ hind legs off and was not working. What had occurred was one of the people at this site had plugged in a USB thumb-drive, a regular occurrence at this location, and the system went to a black screen. No BSOD, no error message, just a dead PC that had to be hard reset. Upon reboot the operating system reported it had crashed due to a “thermal event”. Then it loaded v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y taking over an hour to show the desktop and never drawing the icons.

Since this problem was beyond the scope of the users to repair, my company was called to handle the problem. I am the technical support guy so I packed up my laptop (Loaded with Mandriva Linux of course.), grabbed my briefcase, picked up my organizer and headed out with coffee in hand. Once on site I spoke with the people about the system and opened it up to have a look inside. Since a “thermal event” was reported I was looking for excess dust (There was almost no dust!) or dead cooling fans (All were working.). This indicated to me there was probably not a “thermal event”. I took out my freshly burned Mandriva One 2009.0 Linux live CD with KDE and booted the troubled PC. After going through the selections of keyboard, locale, time and desktop (I chose Compiz Fusion.) the PC booted to Linux and I was able to play around spinning the Compiz Fusion cube for people in the office. I checked the thermal reporting in Linux and all the thermal monitoring was within the average. In other words, the hardware was fine.

After testing the hardware with Mandriva One 2009.0, I recommended that the data be backed up and that XP Professional be restored to factory condition from the Dell recovery partition. Then all updates be applied, programs reloaded and data restored. This was agreed upon and I took the sick PC to our office to begin the repair.

At the office I connected the PC to a KVM switch we use for working on sick computers. I booted Mandriva One 2009.0 again and immediately noticed the mouse was not working. This is a standard KVM with PS/2 type connectors for mouse and keyboard. I pulled a USB mouse from the shelf and connected it to one of the USB ports, moved it a bit and had a working mouse. Then I finished booting into a standard KDE desktop. I did not choose Compiz Fusion this time because, well, let us all admit, that is just eye-candy and not really necessary to get work done.

After booting I had to force mount the NTFS partition for XP Professional because it was showing an unclean shutdown. The Linux ntfs-3g driver will not normally mount an unclean NTFS partition for safety reasons. Safety for the NTFS partition, not for Linux. After mounting the partition I set up a NFS mount at the Mandriva One CLI for one of our server partitions used for backups of data from sick computers. Then I examined the XP Professional partition and using tar zcvf I created an archive of all the data from the XP Professional partition. This included the entire “Documents and Settings” tree as well as a few directories and files that had been created outside that directory structure. Yes, I know this will not respect certain file attributes, like hidden and system, that Microsoft operating systems expect to use. But it works to backup, restoring works and the data is preserved. That is good enough in almost all cases.

Then the Dell PC was rebooted and recovery was started using Ctrl F11 at the Dell boot splash screen. After recovery of XP Professional to factory condition the PC data was restored. Since many of the applications that had been installed no longer existed I spent a few minutes cleaning up errors when loading the XP Professional desktop. I also removed items from the menus by hand and reset the “DESKTOP” files found in several of the menus to hidden. Then began the long process of getting Microsoft updates, updates to the updates, updates to the updates to the updates … you get the picture.

After one set of updates the system began starting with very low graphics settings and giving BSOD at random when trying to reset the graphics to higher resolution. I suspected that an update from Microsoft had caused the original Intel graphics driver from the Dell recovery partition to begin having problems. A download and install of the latest Intel driver for the Intel graphic chip-set on the Dell fixed this problem.

To make a long story just a wee bit longer, the system was delivered. Programs were reinstalled and the PC is once again being used productively at the client’s office. Could I have used other tools to backup and restore the data? Sure, but my point here is that one can do this using a Linux distribution live CD with the tools included in almost all Linux distributions. Cost to you? Only your time learning what to do and how to do it.

Edit Fri Oct 24 21:19:04 UTC 2008: Fix a typo.

Edit Fri Oct 24 22:13:33 UTC 2008: Fix a poorly worded sentence.