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davidmcguffey
Guest
Pastor in our church had a key laptop that wouldn't boot. Being the "go to" IT guy in our church, I ended up with the laptop to fix. Diagnosed the problem to a dying hard disk. Of course he had no backups. 
Laptop was out of warantee and because of the way the big box stores install Windows on the machines, they don't issue a Windows recovery disk anymore. [Microsoft needs to re-evaluate this policy]
Using Ubuntu Linux Live, I was able to boot the machine, and from Linux in memory, mount the hard disk, and copy his data folders to an external usb disk.
I purchased (and donated) a replacement hard disk. After replacing the hard disk, I loaded one of my TechNet licensed copies to test out the new hardware and ensure all his applications could read the data I pulled off the dying disk. All was well. The bad disk sectors seemed to be confined to areas not associated with his data.
I've purchased a retail copy of Win 7 to also donate to him. How do I migrate from one license to another? I've already donated a hard disk, a copy of Win 7, and my time...I would like to avoid having to reinstall all this from scratch again.
Dave
Continue reading...
Laptop was out of warantee and because of the way the big box stores install Windows on the machines, they don't issue a Windows recovery disk anymore.
[Microsoft needs to re-evaluate this policy]Using Ubuntu Linux Live, I was able to boot the machine, and from Linux in memory, mount the hard disk, and copy his data folders to an external usb disk.
I purchased (and donated) a replacement hard disk. After replacing the hard disk, I loaded one of my TechNet licensed copies to test out the new hardware and ensure all his applications could read the data I pulled off the dying disk. All was well. The bad disk sectors seemed to be confined to areas not associated with his data.
I've purchased a retail copy of Win 7 to also donate to him. How do I migrate from one license to another? I've already donated a hard disk, a copy of Win 7, and my time...I would like to avoid having to reinstall all this from scratch again.
Dave
Continue reading...
