My computer's hard drive crashed.

I tried safe mode, but the computer was impossibly slow and I was getting hard drive errors.

Downloaded Ubuntu from ubuntu.com.

Followed the instructions on the website to burn a CD.

Went into my the Bios on my computer (press f2 at startup) to boot from the CD.

Wonderfully, Ubuntu came up.

Ubuntu is a Linux operating system with a Gnome user interface that looks a lot like Windows.

I like it a lot. Clean and easy to use. If you can use Windows you can use Ubuntu and Gnome.

It immediately told me there was a problem with the hard drive, what the problem was, how many sectors were bad, how hot the hard drive was and other interesting information.

Sweet.

All my hardware worked, including two external hard drives.

I used Ubuntu to browse my computer's broken hard drive and copy what files it would let me to the external hard drives.

Did have a backup from three days earlier, so there was not that much to recover.

Did get most of it.

Thank you Ubuntu.

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg