Repair Damaged Drives With Linux

“One of the best developments in recent years has been the Live
CD. These offer a fully functional Linux installation that runs
from an optical drive. If you’ve got enough memory, you can
even install new packages to the RAM disk just as you would when
completing a standard installation. This makes a recent release of
a Live CD-based installer like Ubuntu Jaunty the perfect system
recovery tool. Not only does it include every package you might
require, but because it runs from the optical drive rather than the
hard drive, your data isn’t touched and there’s no
chance files will be overwritten without direct input. It’s
the obvious place to start when you get stuck. Booting Linux

“Probably the most common problem is when the Linux boot menu
disappears or gets corrupted. The most likely reason for this is
that a shared Windows installation has re-stamped its authority
over your disk’s master boot record, overwriting the Grub
boot loader with its own system-launching code. In these cases, you
need to boot into a different Linux environment, either off a Live
CD or from any other Linux booting media you can get hold of. The
distribution you choose will also need to have Grub installed.”

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