Linux.

I love Linux. Unfortunatly though, to use alot of the programs I like, I have to use Windows. Yesterday morning, my windows install on my laptop crashed. It no longer booted. I reinstalled without formatting. It would boot, but it would not install programs. Interesting. So, I formatted it. For this reason, I have a partition on my hard drive for nothing but data. Well, in the process of reinstalling windows, Micro$oft in its infinite wisdom decided to over write my boot partition ( no biggy I can reinstall grub later) and decided that my data partition with my music, emails, pictures, etc should be a hidden drive that I should not be able to access from inside windows. Interesting. This is why Knoppix is your friend. Insert Knoppix 3.6 or newer distro, boot, and use the wonderful program called qtparted to unhide the partition. After this is accomplished, reboot. Everything, or almost everything, is now fixed. Now to install grub.... I will wait till later. I know that I am not suposed to, but I use Knoppix at work all the time when fixing computers. It helps me decide if it is a hardware issue or a software issue. If it is a software issue, I tell the customer that it is. Use knoppix to erase the drives partition table, get the windows restore disks running, and tell the people to have a nice day.