[mdlug] Lemonade on laptop erases hard drive?

[Trevor Jagoda]

It's not the lemonade, it's the google earth.

Perhaps you should not try to look at top secret military installations,
thus activating google's disk-cleanse protocol!



On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Rich Elswick <painbank at gmail.com> wrote:

> photorec and autopsy are your friends.  Don't know if you can recover any
> files as I don't have experience with Yellow stuff on computers.  Or was it
> Pink....
>
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 7:27 AM, David Lee Lambert <davidl at lmert.com>
> wrote:
>
> > About 15 months ago I got my wife a new laptop at the CompUSA
> > going-out-of-business sale.  It came with Windows XP,  so I uninstalled
> the
> > most annoying trial-software and installed Open Office to see how that
> > would
> > work.  She mostly used it for e-mail, web-browsing, and watching DVDs,
>  but
> > at one point I backed up most of our pictures to it.  I might also have
> > some
> > nonessential drafts of my resume on there.
> >
> > Recently my son was looking at Google Earth with it and accidentally
> dumped
> > a
> > cup of lemonade on the keyboard. We shut it down and tried to dry it out.
> > When I booted it up again, it came to a blank screen with a cursor
> flashing
> > in one corner.
> >
> > Later I tried to boot with an old, somewhat scratched,  Knoppix CD.  It
> > came
> > up fine,  but I could tell that some of the keys didn't work properly on
> > the
> > keyboard (hitting "q" once caused about 4 characters to appear on the
> > screen).  I could see 3 partitions on the hard-drive:  the NTFS boot
> > partition,  the FAT32 recovery partition, and a third partition (probably
> > another part of the recovery process).  I could mount the recovery
> > partition,
> > but I got an error trying to mount the NTFS partition.  Other core
> > utilities
> > crashed as well,  so I figured the scratches on the Knoppix CD were
> > significant.
> >
> > I also booted into the BIOS and ran a built-in hard-disk check utility.
> It
> > said the hard-disk was fine.  (By the way,  this is a 2.5" 100GB+ SATA
> > drive
> > in a place where there was no dried lemonade).
> >
> > I ordered a new keyboard and burned a new Knoppix CD (the late-2008
> > version).
> > I couldn't get X or the network to work,  but I could boot to runlevel 3.
> > This version of Knoppix still refused to mount the NTFS filesystem,  and
> > ntfsls only showed one file on it, a ".ini" file.  The FAT32 filesystem
> is
> > still fine.
> >
> > I don't have any other computers with SATA adapters;  but if I did (say
> if
> > I
> > got a USB-SATA adapter for my Ubuntu box, or for another Windows XP
> system
> > I
> > might have access to),  how likely would I be to be able to recover files
> > from that disk?  What other tools would I want to use?
> >
> > The bright side here is that I might just repartition the drive and
> install
> > Linux,  rather that trying to activate the recovery-partition and
> reinstall
> > Windows.
> >
> > --
> > David Lee Lambert ... Software Developer, IBM, member IEEE, ACM
> > Cell phone: +1 586-873-8813
> > work e-mail:  dllamber at us.ibm.com
> > IM: davidleelambert (Yahoo!) or lamber45 at cse.msu.edu (MSN)
> > _______________________________________________
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> > mdlug at mdlug.org
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> >
>
>
>
> --
> Rich Elswick
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