Recently I came across nice article published at Microsoft’s site Port 25 about how to recover crashed Windows using Linux. It’s rather helpful staff written by Chris Travers (who own Metatron Technology Consulting by the way). Here is an introduction quote from the document:
We have all run into cases where Windows refuses to load for one reason or another. The problem may be a hardware or a software failure, and the problem may seem to be irrecoverable. Yet often Linux can be used to help recover data that otherwise might be lost.
In writing this paper, we generally assume that either a Linux workstation is available to accept recovery information or that a USB drive of sufficient size is available to hold the data. Generally in either case, enough free space should be available to store the entire hard drive as a bit-for-bit file and still have at least 2GB of space free. However, if more space is available, the process of organizing the recovered data is a bit easier. If neither of these is available, the utility of Linux in data recovery will be limited.
Download this document in as pdf format here. You can read interesting comments on their site by clicking at this link.
By the way, Port 25 site is copyrighted by Microsoft under the Microsoft Permissive License that is available here.
Now linux help windows.. does windows do the same?