EZ IT Fixes!!

Your Windows crashed again and you didn’t back up your data anywhere else. When I used to work on a desktop, it never really was a big problem for me since I could just take out the Hard Drive and plug it in as a slave on another desktop and copy the data between the two drives. It used to be time consuming and painful but at the end of the day, I always had my data recovered.

Working with laptops is different. You can take out the hard drive (much easier as compared to desktops) but you cannot just plug it to another laptop or a desktop just like that. You may, if you have the right external hard drive enclosure but I had some bad experiences using them.

If you had saved all your data on a separate partition, your data is safe since you can just format your Windows partition and re-install the Operating System without harming the data.. What to do if that is not the case? Reinstall and forget the data? Not everybody can afford that. Luckily, you don’t have to!!

There are free utilities available that can create a CD with an Operating System on it. Then you can use that CD to boot your computer and access your Hard Drive and recover your data. Reatogo-X-PE and BartPE are two such tools that use your original Windows OS CD to create a bootable recovery CD. Once you have created the recovery CD, just connect a USB drive to the computer and boot from that CD. The system may bot detect the USB drive if you attach it after booting from the system. BartPE has a very basic where as Reatogo-X-PE gives you a more Windows like experience with some advance features. Once you are logged-in, just go to My Computer and copy the data from your Hard Drive to the USB Drive and Woala!!

Links:

Reatogo-X-PE

BartPE

Note - Please read the Licensing issues on BartPE website. Same should apply for Reatogo-X-PE as well.

Software, Utilities Crash, Data, Windows

Ever came across a situation when you are asked for help to fix some software issue and you are miles away from the troubled computer? Even more, the person asking for help is not much of computer literate!! I had this issue a bunch of times and I find it very hard to get it resolved. People are not able to describe the problem exactly and even if they do, your solutions may not be that straight forward for them. Guiding them step-by-step may also prove to be troublesome sometimes.

After going through numerous such occasions, I spent some time on Google and found this Free utility, TeamViewer, that can help you take control of a remote computer and do what ever you need to as long as the connection remains active. You just need to have this utility downloaded on both the machines and you will need internet obviously. The connection can be established by putting the auto-generated TeamViewer ID and Password of one system on to the other. Happy troubleshooting… Remotely!!

Link to TeamViewer website

Screenshot:

Internet, Utilities