Posted January 18, 201213 yr Pastor in our church had a key laptop that wouldn't boot. Being the "go to" IT guy in our church, I ended up with the laptop to fix. Diagnosed the problem to a dying hard disk. Of course he had no backups. :( Laptop was out of warantee and because of the way the big box stores install Windows on the machines, they don't issue a Windows recovery disk anymore. :( [Microsoft needs to re-evaluate this policy] Using Ubuntu Linux Live, I was able to boot the machine, and from Linux in memory, mount the hard disk, and copy his data folders to an external usb disk. I purchased (and donated) a replacement hard disk. After replacing the hard disk, I loaded one of my TechNet licensed copies to test out the new hardware and ensure all his applications could read the data I pulled off the dying disk. All was well. The bad disk sectors seemed to be confined to areas not associated with his data. I've purchased a retail copy of Win 7 to also donate to him. How do I migrate from one license to another? I've already donated a hard disk, a copy of Win 7, and my time...I would like to avoid having to reinstall all this from scratch again. Dave Continue reading...
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