Where this computer repair and data recovery service call was located: near Ashland & Bryn Mawr, Chicago).

After some previous appointed work I was back at he office at about 1:00 PM. Checked my email, checked website statistics... and then nothing to do.

So I guessed... right after I thought "This is going to be a slow day", I got a phone call from a feminine voice (for unknown reasons, most of my clients are male):

"Are you doing data recovery services?", asked my new customer, Sarah. "I can't get into Windows anymore".

"Do you see the windows logo screen?", I asked, knowing that we don't do much data recovery if the hard drive is a "dead lemon".

"Yes, but it never finishes."

I seemed like an easy one, kinda like the Geek Squad "backup data and restore the operating system" package.

We agreed for an appointment an hour later. Fired a few more emails and a phone call and in half hour got my 1 Gig USB stick, laptop and the recovery disks and went on my mission. To save Sarah's data!

It was a nice Pentium IV Gateway PC with Windows XP, a little old but of a good build quality that in modern 2006/2007 systems is quite rare. Windows loaded until the logo screen and the the computer restarted. It did the same in safe mode.

I got out my BART PE disk and started the computer from it. But I could not access the hard drive. I could see a 80 Gig partition, but I it displayed "Unknown type" and I could not access it. Whenever I tried to access it, I had huge timeouts when the computer hanged (waiting for I/O) and I would hear the a metallic click from the faulty hard disk.

I had another rescue disk that had a Dos mode NTFS driver and could access the files. So I still had some basic access, only that trying to copy the entire My Documents folder from dos mode can be quite a challenge. Not to mention that in Dos you can only see and restore the first 6-8 characters of the filename.

At that moment I decided to use the Dark Force: Linux. I booted the Knoppix CD that I always have. I knew that good NTFS support in Linux is only read-only, but it's sometimes more reliable that Microsoft's Windows. So it was, I was able to mount the faulty partion on Linux and transfer everything to the flash drive, the to my laptop, and then to the backup DVD.

After that successful data recovery with Linux, I replaced the hard disk with a new one from Microcenter: 100 Gig for $49 (I never push my own hardware, like... ahem... Best Buy's Geek Squad). I restored the Windows Operating system, installed Firefox 2.0, a free antivirus and a free spyware removal tool, got my check a a promise that I'm gonna be recommended to their friends.