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  • Knusper@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I know, this is easier said than done for someone unfamiliar with this stuff, but maybe still good to know that this is an option in future:

    You can prepare a “Linux Live USB” and select in the BIOS that it should boot off of that.
    It’ll start a complete OS off of that USB, so you can access the hard drive (assuming you didn’t enable disk encryption) and at the very least backup your files, or sometimes even resolve whatever keeps you from accessing Windows.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Remember: Those were probably the times of a single computer at home and having a spare laptop somewhere ready for that is not the default.

      • RustySharp@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Those were the times when I had to pull out my hard drive, ride my bike to my best mate’s house, and plug it into their PC so I could finish up a report due the next day. All because Windows 95 didn’t shut down cleanly and refused to boot.

      • Knusper@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I did actually remember that, but figured, they must have had some way of reinstalling Windows, too.

        I guess, though, they might have had a physical Windows install disk at home. So, yeah, would have had to prepare a Linux Live CD before disaster struck…

        • locuester@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          CD? Windows 98 first edition was released on floppies. And Linux was not some simple thing. Red hat hadn’t even created yum and Debian hadn’t even created apt.

          The late 90’s was a chore of library visits and 14.4k baud XModem transfer interruptions.

      • bort@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        This sort of nonsense right here is why infosec people warn about having physical access to machines

        • jvisick@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          It’s not just because of nonsense, it’s more that it doesn’t really matter what you do - the only thing stopping someone with physical access to your machine is their level of determination.

          At some point, there’s no stopping the laws of physics. Your data is physically stored there. You can do a lot to make it really difficult to access it, but the best you can do is full disk encryption with a sufficiently strong key, and only store that key on external hardware that isn’t accessible to the attacker.

          Even then, you better make sure that your encryption key wasn’t hanging around cached anywhere in memory before you shut down your computer.

    • this_1_is_mine@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      this i do all the time. you can even make a persistance on the drive so its not just like a fresh install every boot. really nice if you wont have access to internet on the host hardware so if you need sometool inparticular you can have it installed already