Hey, everyone. This is Will from Be Your Own IT, and I want to do a short video, well, maybe not so short video today, on showing you how to use a rescue CD or a Linux live CD to go into your Windows installation and recover your data. In this case, I’m going to be using VMware Player to virtualize the machines, and there is a large, rather problematic bug that I’m going through right now with this system. And basically what it is doing is, whenever I load a Linux guest up on a machine that’s designed for Windows, it’s having a thing where my mouse will be down here and the actual mouse pointer is over here.

So it’s kind of difficult to show what’s going on, but I think I can show enough to get the major points across, and explain well enough that it’ll work out.

First I’m going to undo that disc. OK, we’re going to start the Windows seven virtual machine.

What I’m going to do here in Windows seven is I’m actually going to put a couple of files around the hard drive so I can go find them with the live CD. Now, this is assuming that there’s nothing actually physically wrong with the drive. Like, maybe you just got a horrible blue screen. Maybe it’s got a nasty virus, and you just have data that you want to back up, and then you’re going to go in here…

…say, with your Windows disc, and level the place and do a complete restore. Anyhow, let’s go over here to Documents. Computer. Users. These are where most of your informational files are going to be stored. If you’re worried about missing anything, go over here to Folder and search options, and go to View, and hit Show hidden files. And then you’ll see your AppData and some other things. AppData is like, if you had Windows Live Mail, it’d be installed in there. Game profiles are installed in there. Certain preferences and certain data itself is installed in there.

Anyhow, go to My Music. I’m going to put a text file called Go into Pictures. Oops. Let’s put in one called “family memories.” Go to Documents, and we’ll be like and… Oops. And “my taxes.” All very important things; all very different reasons to have things on there.

Now I’m going to put that disc back in, because this is my disc here. It’s the equivalent of me putting a Linux live CD in the machine. I’m going to use the Fedora disc. Normally I could use Parted Magic, which is also on the Ultimate Boot CD, and you can log in through there, but it was giving me some issues, so I’ll demo on Fedora Core.

Go to Restart. And VMware, unlike VirtualBox, actually has a… No, I missed it!

Hang on one second. It actually has a virtualized BIOS like a standard machine, so I will be able to show you, if I am going to write the thing… no, not that time either! It goes very fast, especially on your machines that you actually have some decent speed on. We’re going to go to Enter Setup. There’s actually a button here. This is a PhoenixBIOS setup utility. Most of your BIOSes either look something similar to this, or they have the two-column layout with the menus. I don’t have one of those on hand at the moment, so I’m just going to go through and explain this one. Most of them are always going to be the same. The purposes of both are the same. You’ll see PhoenixBIOS in a lot of your HP and ASUS laptops; some of your desktop boards as well.

And what we’re after is over here in Boot. If you read here, along the side, Enter expands or collapses. So it shows you the bootable cards or that. And Removable Devices would be like floppy drives. D disables. I don’t have a floppy drive.

Oh well. You hit here and hit plus, up and down. A lot of them will just let you hit Enter and move them up and down. But as you can see, CD-ROM on top of the hard drive. That’s where you want it. Exit and save changes. Now, that Fedora disc is in there, so instead of booting to Windows 7, it booted to Fedora. We’re going to boot. If you’re having problems with it booting, like you’re turning it on, you’re trying to boot it up, you can actually go and select the basic video option. There’s a couple other things.

If you’re good enough with a command line, you can actually do this all without an interface at all, and that’s pretty much going to work on just about every piece of hardware unless there’s a massive problem. But this is going to be the easier option for newer users.

And now the bug that I was talking about is going to rear its ugly head. As you see, when I click and drag, my mouse is not in the right spot.

So, what I’m actually going to do… normally, you come down here, and it’s a full Fedora icon, and you open up Dolphin, which is the file manager. But I can do this… no, I’ve got to do it up here.

I want to make sure I… nope, that’s not what I want. Open the Dolphin. There we go. Now, you see along here, you’ve got your Home, your Network, your Root, your Trash, and any additional hard drives that are shown.

You click on Root, you see your file system here in Linux. And if things are actually mounted in your Linux operating system, they’re going to show up, either in Media, or in Mount, depending on how they’re mounted.

I’ll have another video sometime on actually how to do mounting. In that case you’d be able to see them inside this folder, but as it’s not mounted; nothing there. You come down here and click on the 40 gig, and you can see the file structure from our Windows drive.

That’s Recovery. Now, remember, as before, went to Users. There’s my User, and My Documents. Now, there’s the family memories. Because my mouse isn’t working properly, I can try. No, not quite. I’ll just do a copy, and I’ll click out of this guy, here.

There we go. I’ll do a paste. And you’ll go through. Oops, that’s not what I want. Back here in Users. Back to My Documents. Go through My Music; My Important Music. Sorry about the awkwardness.

So, normally you’d just be dragging and dropping these with your mouse having a great old time, but because of the weird mouse bug, I have to do it like this. You click down here. We can close that.

Now, what I’m going to do is tell the virtual machine that it’s OK to pass through my flash drive. What that’s going to do is; essentially, it’s the same thing as me plugging in a flash drive to a working machine.

You can also do this if you had a Burning Software installed. In this case, you could have a small Linux installation on a different drive as an emergency boot. And you can install something like K3B.

And if you have Burning Software installed, what you can, actually, do is copy your data over and burn it directly off to DVD from there. And if you look here, for VM ware, I’m going to connect my USB drive. There we go.

Because of my mouse problem, it’s going to give me lip the whole way, but that’s OK. There we go, get that. Open up the Lexar drive, and grab these and drop them in. In this case, I’m going to copy them all.

You do Ctrl C for Copy. Grab this thing here and do a paste. You see down here, it’s already backed-up My Documents. And that’s really all there is to it. And now, when you shut this guy down, you can pull your flash drive out and, now, the documents, you can put them in any other PC, and you should be able to open them.

If you are doing this because of a virus, you should be a little careful so you don’t accidently re-infect other PC. You might want to use a virus scanner. There is a couple for Linux. There’s also a couple that are self-contained where they’ll boot by themselves.

So, this has been Will from Be Your Own IT, and this is how you rescue data with a live CD. You can drop any questions here on YouTube. Ask a question here, I’ll request a new video here. Either that or you can come to our forums at www.beyourownit.com/forum.

There you can, again, ask a question or ask for new videos. You can also help our members with their questions. You can also come to the beyourownit.com/store, which, there we have a full line of PC computer repair training videos.

We also have toolkits available. So, come on, stop by, and check us out. And I’ll see you on the forums, and you all have a great day.