I was working in the lab late one night…

It’s been a busy time at Bristol Wireless lately. Our Jim was here till nearly 9 pm a couple of nights ago recovering some data for a customer from a dead laptop’s hard drive for transfer to a refurbished machine.

In addition, Jim has also been attending to a sick Windows box infected by viruses that he was cleaning off the hard drive using a Linux live CD called Trinity Rescue Kit (or TRK. Ed.) TRK is aimed specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery jobs. TRK can recover and reset passwords, remove viruses, recover and undelete files, recover lost partitions and so on.

Still on the repair front, your ‘umble scribe had to rescue an Easypeasy Linux netbook whose hard drive was full and therefore wouldn’t allow logins. The repair entailed booting off a USB key, dropping into a terminal and then using chroot and dpkg to create some space on the machine, followed by creating more space by removing the default OpenOffice productivity suite and replacing it with the lighter Abiword package. This was the first time yours truly had used chroot.

We’ve also been providing some guidance and tuition on the WordPress blogging platform to The Severn Project, a scheme that helps those with drug, alcohol and mental health problems to reintegrate into society by providing training in horticulture.

Anyway, it’s time to get back to the Monster Mash… 🙂