@ tggzzz
https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
You should still be able to repair your partition table or reprovision the drive for GRUB. If you're built on a RAID, you're probably still well & truly fooked, though. Good luck, my friend.
mnem
After many blind alleys using things on that disc, I decided the MBR/GRUB/etc was well and truly hosed. So I followed my initial inclination: find out what partitions are there and where, and reinstall xubuntu. Worked like a charm, no data lost.
Oh the wonders of knowing I have all the data I've generated on a different partition to the OS: beat that MS. Actually they might be going along the track to end up where MS was with their first multitasking multiuser OS, i.e. having everything in /users on Xenix.
Now back to playing with the results of GAS...
Well, at least UBCD helped with that part, right?
The linux live cd and installer give the same information.
Yeah, okay. You do realize that the UBCD is just that, right? It's a live Windows disc AND a *NIX Live disc with a GRUB-like PBE. This is not a "product" made by some "service company" to sell "Rescue" thumb drives; it is a collection of open source service & repair tools made by and for computer techs to fix borked Windoze installs. The fact it is STILL useful after 15 years is testament to how well-thought-out that collection of tools was. IIRC, it even has a (now probably painfully prehistoric) Xindows installer on it.
You can specify where your data goes. Apps and their data, that requires paying attention at installation time, but usually still can be done. Or just let Winblows back it all up to OneDriveBy...
Yeah, everybody thinks their app is fucking special and MUST be integrated into Windoze. While MS encourages this behavior, app developers still CAN make simple executables that run where you plant them.
I'm not clever enough to run Windows.
Yeah, I can roundly agree with that. It really
sucks having to "outwit" a machine that is
SUPPOSED TO BE a helpful tool just to get your actual work done. Unfortunately, that is part & parcel of the world we now live in, where EVERYTHING is "designed by committee".
Unfortunately, our choices right now are that, a racehorse designed by salesmen, a 4H project horse designed by amateurs, or worse yet, a draught horse designed by an amateur committee. Yeah, for me it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. I know nothing about MacOS so if anything goes wrong in that process I would have a hard time knowing how to fix the problem.
The path of least effort, which also doesn't involve any violations of Apple's T&C would be for me to just pick up a used Mac. But I go on eBay and even a used Mac Mini new enough to at least have a core i5 and 4GB of RAM costs almost $300 used. For me that's a bit hard to justify just to play around with a Mac to see what they are about.
I see so much self inflicted pain here.
I see a macOS VM and I see effort and friction and the path of least resistance evaporates before me resulting in instant disinterest. If I want a pilgrimage to a supposedly better land I’ll take the credit card tour. If that feels like it hurts too much I figure it’s a place I don’t want to go enough.
Same with magic boot discs and other snake oil.
Windows has a surprisingly good set of tools like diskpart/bootsect and a USB live recovery image built into the installer that allows you to talk to bitlocker encrypted partitions. No clever required. Just google which way to wave the dead chicken over the corpse to revive it.
See above. UBCD is not snake oil; it's just a collection of tools to help you get into and fix a borked Windoze install.
When I was an HP ASP, aside from their DMI/Tattoo discs I carried an optical disc copy of the UBCD, PW-RESET, DBAN and IFL along with a thumb drive containing the latest MS incremental update rollups/service packs and GHOST, NINITE, MBAM, Belarc, Shadow Explorer and SCEP Install.
I RARELY had to resort to nuke/pave, and my clients were always thankful that I was able to save their existing install and their data. In most cases, it took less time than the nuke/pave too, as the HP System Restore was effing SLOW and while supposedly the process was to start the recovery and leave, in practice, due to the clients being "premiere" customers, we were required in most cases to wait for it to finish and create user accounts, install printers, etc and start Windoze updates.
As for trying to VM OSX... yeah, that's just putting your ballsack on the anvil and handing out mallets.
If you really want to play with OSX, you're right; the best bet is a used Mac Mini for ~$300. That REALLY isn't much of a gamble; it's highly unlikely that you won't be able to get most of your money back, if not make a profit, in doing so. Not really ok with anything. Just everyone sets themselves up for a fight. The three prevailing options are:
1. I want a Mac but I don’t want to pay for one thus I will use a hacked up VM or frankenmac.
2. I want to use Linux and am hiding the complexity and general churn and stack of failure conditions.
3. I want to use windows but it kicks me in the balls once a week.
Cheapest solution at the time is to buy a jock strap and put duct tape round windows’ feet
A good thing to note is that if you do use something at work, it’s healthy to use something else at home. Keeps the problem domain different so it doesn’t feel like you take work home. I use Linux at work. And Apple can’t make keyboards that work.
Edit: I watched a Japanese TV game show ages ago where there was a man who lived with a goat for a week in a single room until he basically went insane. I draw parallels to that and computers.
Fuck you... that furry little fuckard kept standing over me and drooling all night; it was like water torture only with goat-breath. My choice as well. Not just because of testicular tenderness; but because I got sick & tired of living 6-18 months behind the rest of the world waiting for new hardware and peripherals to make their way to Mac or *NIX.
It's nice to see a new gadget on slAmazon and be able to just click
[BUY] rather than asking myself if Jobs' ghost is going to try and rape me with HTML5 again or if the
Purple Hats will ever write a driver for my new gewgaw.
mnem
And worst of all, she wouldn't put out.