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I started with Linux in late 90's. Those were times when Ubuntu didn't exist yet, and the most popular distribution was Red Hat Linux. I was then curious about what Linux was, and how it worked. Although Windows had gained total desktop market share at that time, I felt something 'magical' about Linux and its terminal. It was just different and reminded me of the good MS-DOS times when GUI – as it is known nowadays – didn't exist yet for standard users.
But I never got into Linux as much as I could. Many distributions appeared, and I tried many of them, but, from the beginning, my favorite was Ubuntu. Mainly because it was so user friendly. However, with almost all distributions and versions, I had some problems. Some of them didn't work correctly after installation; there were issues with drivers; some even wouldn’t install on my computers because of hardware mismatches – they just didn't work. So my passion for Linux decreased; however I'm always optimistic about each new release.
Just to clarify – I'm a Microsoft guy. I work with Microsoft products every day and I live from programming in .NET. I'm not planning to change this in the near future; however I’m an open-minded person, so I decided that I would like to improve my various programming skills and Ubuntu would be a great platform in order to achieve this goal. So I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on a virtual machine – because I don't like using my main operating system (which should be fast, and without any additions installed) for development tasks, and I'm happy with it. It works smoothly and fast without any significant issues. The evolution of virtualization software makes such decisions easier. Frequently, I have installed with dual- or multi-boot using custom partitioning, but it just does not feel right these days.
Last week I had a pretty scary moment. I was doing maintenance tasks on moving files between internal and external drives, which I use as a kind of backup. Suddenly, the most important external drive – with the most of my important data – stopped working. It was spinning up at the power on, but Windows didn't manage to mount them into the operating system. I was pretty scared seeing this behavior, because I had already lost one drive in a similar way. There were two possibilities – either the disk was down, or the external enclosure was broken in some way.
I had to quickly find a way to retrieve files from the disk. They were important for me and I needed them fast. But the problem was that this external drive is an old ATA and I had no possibility of plugging it into my current PC. I had to find the reason why the disk wasn't mounting on my computer. Then, I thought that, instead of spending some money and losing time to find, buy and wait for new external enclosure, I could use my really old PC which was put in the closet for a couple of years. I grabbed it, put an empty hard drive inside, and powered on. It has single core processor, 1 GB of RAM, makes strange noises, but it's working. I needed an operation system only in order to retrieve files. So my natural first thought was to install Ubuntu 13.04 which I had burned on CD earlier. Installation was quite fast; it took about 20 minutes and I had Ubuntu running – with its full Unity experience. I have to say that I didn't expect such a good performance with such an old hardware. It is not super fast but it runs quite well.
Having prepared this computer with a working Ubuntu, I plugged my external drive and… it worked. All data was there without any broken partitions or corrupted files. Quick connect to Windows share, and I was able to copy all files into my working SATA internal hard drive. Thanks Ubuntu - you saved my money and my time, and restored my old computer to life.