Steven and Linda Or rather Devin and Wesley

Have you ever deleted a vital partition and needed to receover it, I recently had to recover a HD with deleted partitions. I never had to do that before so the first step was to google “free partition recovery” utility and several variations, and all the results are buyware, free downloads but only demos showing off the capabilities of their paid software. Most of these results hid the demo part so that you wouldn’t find out it was crippled until you burnt the ISO and booted from their recovery CD, that was just plain annoying — at least be upfront about it!!

So I add to opensource to the search query (free partition recovery utility opensource) and voila! Testdisk which not only recovered the FAT32 partitions but did so without having to reboot from Windows. Sweet!!

Also another Opensource solution that worked advertised for me this week was getting a Samba server up and running from scratch in about 30 mins using Ubuntu Server LTS. It really is as simple as running the install CD (which BTW was the quickest I’ve seen for Linux) and doing an apt-get for samba and sshd, even the reiserfs partition from my previous server was easily mountable. Nice!