Screwdriver set comes in handy

Last week I talked about the hard disk problems that someone in the office was having. I was trying to download Knoppix or Ubuntu as a LiveCD from which to boot off of and save the data. Unfortunately, the Knoppix image was about 50 megabytes too large to fit on the CD, and the Ubuntu .iso took far too long to download. Even after downloading, when I tried to write the image to CD-R, my CD writing software decided that it would rather write the image file to the disk as a data file rather than a disk image. So I ended up burning two disks with bad images.

Finally, after deciding not to waste any more time and CD-Rs, I got out my screwdriver set and took the hard disk out of the laptop. We went over to a nearby electronics shop and picked up an external hard disk case and stuck the broken drive in there. When we plugged the external hard disk USB cable to another PC, the disk came right up and we were able to rescue the data. Hooray!