Your old CDs – especially ones you’ve burned yourself – degrade over time, to the point that they’re unreadable. We’ll show you how to squeeze as much data out of them as you can, before it’s too late!

The tool we’re going to use to do this is called ddrescue, which can be easily accessed from the Live CD environment. ddrescue can make .iso files out of your CDs, which can then either be burned to a more reliable CD, or can be mounted and accessed in all modern operating systems.

Boot into the Ubuntu Live CD environment using a burnt CD or a prepared flash drive.

First, we’ll install ddrescue. Open up the Synaptic Package Manager (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager). continue reading…

Windows 7 uses a feature called homegroup, which enhances the workgroup feature in order to make home networking easier for all Windows 7 computers. However, this feature doesn’t work on Linux or older version of Windows. In order to connect your Linux computers to Windows 7 computers and share files and folders, you need to make a series of settings. First, it is to change the workgroup, so that all computers belong to one workgroup. In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to configure and change the workgroup on an Ubuntu PC.

Step 1: Install Samba

Samba is a package for Unix systems that provides support for cross-platform files and printers sharing, and is needed for Ubuntu to access shared resources on a Windows network. In this case, you’ll need to add your Ubuntu PC to a workgroup in order to connect to a Windows network. To install Samba, access your terminal application from your main panel in Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

In your terminal, you’ll need to install the “samba” and “smbfs” packages, by typing the following command:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

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There are lots of utilities to recover deleted files, but what if you can’t boot up your computer, or the whole drive has been formatted? We’ll show you some tools that will dig deep and recover the most elusive deleted files, or even whole hard drive partitions.

We’ve shown you simple ways to recover accidentally deleted files, even a simple method that can be done from an Ubuntu Live CD, but for hard disks that have been heavily corrupted, those methods aren’t going to cut it. In this article, we’ll examine four tools that can recover data from the most messed up hard drives, regardless of whether they were formatted for a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, or even if the partition table is wiped out entirely.

Note: These tools cannot recover data that has been overwritten on a hard disk. Whether a deleted file has been overwritten depends on many factors – the quicker you realize that you want to recover a file, the more likely you will be able to do so.

Our setup

To show these tools, we’ve set up a small 1 GB hard drive, with half of the space partitioned as ext2, a file system used in Linux, and half the space partitioned as FAT32, a file system used in older Windows systems. We stored ten random pictures on each hard drive.

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When Windows goes wrong, it can go really wrong. Worse: Often it’s extremely difficult to save your system from Windows itself. Here’s how to use a simple USB drive to free space, remove viruses, rescue passwords, and more from crunked Windows setups.

Photo by *manci*.

What You Can Fix with this Method

If you or your in-need friends or relatives can’t boot into your Windows desktop, or you can’t actually do anything once you’re into it, booting up a live Ubuntu system from a USB thumb drive, or off a burned CD, can save your system, recover files, and pull off other miracles. Here’s the short list of things we’ll cover here:

• Clean a virus with a Linux-based anti-virus app.
• Recover files and save them onto that same thumb drive, to a web storage spot like Dropbox, or to another USB drive.
• Change your login password if you’ve forgotten it, or someone’s changed it on you.
• Analyze your hard drive to figure out what’s filled it, and resize partitions if you’re dual booting and need to free up more space. continue reading…