Operating System Choice

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questor 2 posts Wednesday, 04. June 2008 03:34AM

HI:

An older computer has had its hard drive wiped..as far as I can tell. The person I gave the drive to was to back up some data and scan for viruses. I couldn't get on the internet to download a virus checker myself.

Anyway, I turned it on last night and find that the hard drive is wiped clean. It boots to a C: prompt and then no files or subdirectories can be found. I do have a cd of data files at least...so my digital pictures are not lost.

Compaq doesn't sell the restore disks anymore..and I can't find mine....so I guess it is time to try LINUX. I am not even sure this will work. How do I find out if LINUX is compatible with the hardware? Which one should I try? The computer is about 7 years old. A Compaq EZ2600. Had Windows 98.

Any suggestions out there? Or where on the WEB to turn for help? Or any ideas at all on getting a working computer?

Thanks.

avarice 2 posts Wednesday, 04. June 2008 03:52AM

Hold your horses there man.

Data recovery can be super-easy but the more HDD activity in between, the more date you'll lose. My personal favorite for end-users is called GetDataBack. The NTFS version is $79; the FAT version is $69, you'll want to check since its running windows 98. That price is great compared to the $2000-$3000 most programs will charge, and this one is just as good. It also offers a demo version if you want to make sure the files you need are recoverable before you buy...or, you know, try anything else out with it.

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Missed a detail with your post though. You'll need to have some kind of OS installed to use any of these programs, there's just no way around that unfortunetely.

norskvik 22 posts Wednesday, 04. June 2008 09:37PM

What operating system are you using? Does come up in Windows? if not, do you have the Windows serial number of your old system?

mrb4d 8 posts Wednesday, 04. June 2008 11:20PM

Try to recover your data if possible, if not it depends what you want to do and use your computer for there are distros of Linux for everything from pen testing to software development to forensics. i just started using Fedora 9 - all i have to say is wow. I sugest downloading some live CDs (they will be slower then if you install on your computer) and try those out.

Ubuntu is good for Linux beginners, so my advice start with one that is easy to install (Ubuntu or Fedora 9) if you get used to those and want to try something different, here is a site that might help you chose what one is best for you <http://www.linux.org/>
Good luck