Situation: a Vista user has clicked on an attachment in a "friend's" email, now the machine won't do anything networkily sensible, so is evidently virussed to the eyeballs & beyond. There was no obvious hope of getting something working enough to copy their documents & image off, so... Response: boot a Kubuntu LiveCD, investigate system without hearing the opinion of any viruses. Install Kubuntu over the "Recovery" partition ( /dev/sda2 ). Plug in another hard drive (machine has only 2x SATA power cables, so need to unplug the DVD drive to do this). Boot Kubuntu, Copy docs/images onto temp hard drive (tar.bz2 as the drive is kinda small). Boot into Kubuntu, DHCP picks up an address from the ADSL router, can now browse & do banking. Good! Fetch Windows 7 Eternity disc, Install that, no worries but Kubuntu now invisible. Boot Kubuntu LiveCD, in recovery mode, re-run GRUB. Kubuntu is now visible. To avoid the risk of trashing the man MS-Windows part
Linux Advocate in Western Australia