What to do?
Last week I was resizing the main partition on my laptop, trying to create a little more space. Whilst in the middle of the operation, the laptop had a power failure, it may have been overheating. Upon restarting the laptop, and restarting the partioning software, it was found that there was no recovery setup. And the partition was now listed as an unknown format.
“Oh, f**k,” I thought!!! “There goes all my photos etc!!!”
Luckily it doesn’t seem to have destroyed much of the data, if any, as I can see the filenames etc when I boot up into DOS. I’ve taken the laptop to a local computer shop and I’m getting them to get the data off the hard drive for me, as I have no way of getting it off by myself or indeed a recent back-up.
This is an important lesson! Make sure you back up data regularly (and especially when you’re going to be messing around with the hard drive! 
)
Now the question is: Do I reinstall Windows or should I move to Linux?
I’ve been looking at Linux for a while now, and the Ubuntu distribution seems to be favourite at the minute. I’ve previewed it before the little mishap occurred and was toying with the idea of a dual-boot system.
The other problem may be that when I bought the laptop there was no Windows operating system disk supplied, so I may have to install Ubuntu anyway.
I’m due to get my laptop back on Wednesday, so I’ll see what the damage is and then make my decision. It may even be a dual boot, who knows.
But one thing is for sure, I’ll be backing up on a VERY regular basis! 
