Vista Question

[itendtoweez]

Before I drop a bunch of money on an OS, I decided I'd give Vista a try. So I was going to be fine with the 30 day trial, but I got a little greedy. I followed the instructions that were posted on digg, and talked about on diggnation.
After running the crack and restarting my computer, it now tells me my 30 days are up. Is there anything I can do? And if not, is there a way to get my data off easily? I honestly could care less about Vista, I just want my data.

[fighterinferno]

You could try using a live version of Linux to access the data. But I'm not terribly familiar with data recovery.

[bman]

A live version of linux wouldn't help, how and where would ya save your data too. When it says 30 days are up, can you get into vista at all?

[jdhore]

Originally Posted by bman

A live version of linux wouldn't help, how and where would ya save your data too. When it says 30 days are up, can you get into vista at all?

no you can't get into Vista after the 30 days...and a live CD of Linux would work...if you had another computer on the network you could send the data to, a FAT32 external Hard Drive or you could FTP it to a filehost (like Dreamhost which offers 200GB of space for example)

[bman]

ahh thats true, but you need to know somewhat of unix to use that ability in linux do you not? And what if you don't have a network with other computers, then his in trouble.

[fighterinferno]

Wouldn't it really depend on how much data he'd want to recover? Because if he hooked a USB drive up and booted Knoppix wouldn't he be able to migrate the data to the USB drive?

[bman]

true, guess I dont think both ways lol

I was assuming there was enough data.

[jeffchan]

Simple. If you have a DVD burner, which you probably do to install Vista, its even more easy.

Pop in any live Linux distro that has a DVD burner utility. I prefer Ubuntu very very easy to use. Burn your data onto a DVD inside the linux distro.

[jdhore]

ok, i'll try to respond to everyone...first, on the issue of DVD Burning, the liveCD locks the drive so that option's out if you only have 1 optical drive...2nd: in order to do something simple like mounting 2 Hard Drives in Linux, as long as they're connected when the system is booting, it'll automatically mount them. also, the FTPing or transferring to another computer on the network is pretty easy...

[_sorrow_]

I don't really have any useful input on the discussion, but i do think its kind of funny that 10 days after the guy asked his question (in his one and only post) the discussion kept going in here

On second thought, i'm pretty sure that the Mandriva 1 live cd recognized my external USB HD when i popped it in a couple weeks ago... so if thats true, couldn't he just buy an external hard drive or flash drive, and pop all the information on there? The concept has been discussed, but i figured i may as well put in my two cents