A bad bad day, help....

[ilikemoneygreen]

So my moms Toshiba Satwllite M305 is not in the best of moods.
Its always had a problem of not being able to do windows updates for some reason... It always seemed to have a problem with windows installer. Thats not the reason im posting though, to go through in summary, SP1 of Vista tried installing today by my moms hand. What this has done is made a frustrating error that prevents boot (!! 0xc0190036 !!). Now normally i would be like its ok, ill try safe mode and repair the sucker. Nope. Safe mode hang errors at crcdisk.sys.

This PC has a whole bunch of important data, so i figure well maybe i should back it up and factory reset, itl be clean that way. Well i figure the easy way to do that is through a live Ubuntu usb stick. So i download Unetbootin, and download the newest Ubuntu 12.10 one on my USB drive. Well, it quite litterally just hung on that on. Nothing popped up only a flashing _ for 40 minutes. I downloaded 12.04 lts and same thing.

I laugh to myself... wtf. SO i just copy and paste the linux to a backup hardrive. NO dice their. I grab a different flash drive thats my everyday carry. This time i go directly to Ubuntu site and download the 12.10 x64 from them diretly and make a usb stick from their recommended pendrivelinux ....

I get a "No Default or configuration directive found!" error. Well that usb was a Fat 32. Hmmm i google around and discover that maybe i should install fat 16 on it. Ok, well somehow i cant remove 7 important files off my everyday carry to so i dont wanna format that stick, ill figure out that problem later....SO that means i grab another flash drive. STARKILLER from a game i got. Flashed that sucker to FAT and now it still gives me a "No DEFAULT or UI configuration directive found! error. I also found a solve that worked on other peoples that naming stuff different in linux 3 specfic things worked on them but not for me becuase they were already named that
Problem....After problem... After Problem.... ARG..... My computer nerdness has taken a hit today. I next am going to try a dvd but i dont seem to have any so thats going to have to wait i guess.. Any ideas here? Im kinda running on just frustration at this point. Once your fixing the 20th problem it seems like a mountain is being climbed.

 

[skittle]

Hi, sorry to hear the frustrations! Just a couple of notes:
1.) it sounds like the hard drive is failing in the mothers laptop. Suggest replacing it, as soon as you recover the important data.
2.) First thing: make a backup image of the drive using (gnu)ddrescue then rescue data from that. Do not try to read data right off the drive.
follow instructions here: ubuntu data recovery
3.) I have never had luck with unetbootin or pendrive. Please try making the live-usb with 'lili' : link to lili

 

[ilikemoneygreen]

Ill try that live usb thing. Its weird though becuase i tried both unetbootin and ubuntus recommended way on 3 seperate computers and they all three didnt work. Count me as surprised. Its funny because i just got frustrated and downloaded 9.10 kubuntu on unetbootin like the old days and everything worked great. so its the newer stuff that has issues whatever they may be. thats a different problem i shall solve later though. Kubuntu runs great for now.