Don't blame your Computer

Today I went to dad's office. There was a guy typing something and shouting "you damn old computer ate all my files...... **** ...  **** ...". He was really upset. I have no job there, I just went to give a document to my dad. I went near that guy and asked what happened. He said that the previous day, the computer never get boot. They called the technician. That damn old guy (actually not the computer) simply format the hard disk and installed a new WindowsXP (he is still two version back. So its correct to say damn old guy). So all the files he saved went to the outer space.

Not only him, most of my college friends do the same (me too, a couple of times). They think if the OS get crashed, everything has gone. And the only solution is to reinstall the OS. Its not correct actually. In Windows itself they gave an option to recover their OS, if its crashed (But most of the time it won't work. Because it is Windows). But you no need to loss your saved files. You will have to leave only the software those are installed in your computer. If you have a back-up for it, you'll never.

I hardly recommend to use more than one partition in your computer. One is for your Operating System and others, use as you wish. Store all your files, documents, songs, movies, etc in the other partition, not the one where the OS is installed. Even Windows provide My Pictures, My Movies like stuffs, don't trust. Because it is Windows. So if your OS get crashed (its common, as it is Windows), you can reinstall the OS in the old partition and the files saved in other partition are safe (even the viruses. But they won't run).

Even if you saved some data in the operating system's partition, you no need to worry. Always there is Linux to help you. Nowadays most of the Linux operating system comes as live Cd. It means you no need to install them. You can directly run them from the CD. Download such a live CD. You can write it into a CD, DVD or even in your pen drive (I'm not kidding. You can run OS from your pen drive) and boot from it. Now you can browse you hard disk and copy the required files to another media. Thats all. Now you can install your all time favorite Windows once again.

You can find link to download most of the Linux distribution here.