Ubuntu to the rescue

Eric had scheduled some time with me to try and revive an old hard drive of his, salvage any content and copy it over to a new external drive. The old drive was a 20GB/FAT32/Windows 98 partition. When I hooked it up to the Drive Dock and connected it to my Mac, OS X wanted to initialize the drive. When I connected it to a PC, WinXP could see that there was a drive but claimed it was unable to assign a drive letter and therefore could not display the contents. Then I threw the Ubuntu 7.04 live disc into a Mac, booted, connected the drive dock and voila! Ubuntu, the diversity-celebrating software that it is, didn’t care about the drive’s format, manufacturer, creed, or gender, it just said “Welcome! Go forth, have fun.” We connected Eric’s new external drive and rescued the old data.

I’m a fan of Ubuntu (I’ll spare you a rant) and it’s situations like this that make me love it. Thanks for reading. You may now return to your normal operating system.