Neocolours

Tonight I came back from dinner to find that my laptop had shut down (presumably because of the ongoing issue with the AC adapter, which makes it go to battery power occasionally even when plugged in) and refused to boot up again. The Dell screen loads, and then I get a completely black screen with a cursor flashing in the upper left corner. My brother booted from a CD... some sort of Linux... and tried to do a backup but ran into issues with Mac/Windows compatibility and stuff like that. And then he had to go to bed because he'd been up for 38 hours.

I'll be taking it in to the shop tomorrow, which means I have to get up way early and drive my dad to work so I can use the car. I really hope they can fix it. I suppose I can afford to buy myself a computer now but I would rather not - yes, it may be nearly five years old, but it still does what I need it to. And I'd probably lose all my music - again. The hard drive seems to be fine at the moment but who knows what'll happen when they start poking around.

Until this gets fixed, no more Cabal Online Sorry, Ty!

Aw, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope your computer feels better soon! Laptops are great things, but they're also one of the most frustrating inventions ever. *shakes fist* I have two laptops out of commission, myself.

Try again with the Live CD first if you've time, just in case anything happens - if you follow a guide like this one, you should be able to manage it without your brother's help Definitely don't go as far as the install (Live CDs are intended to show you what Linux can do with a view to installing it from that disk eventually); all you want to do is open up your files and copy them across to something like an external hard drive, a memory stick or an FTP server.

Turns out my dad wants to look at it first - he asked me if it was critical to have it running and I had to admit that it wasn't - so it could be several days, but with increased chances of having a backup.

I'll take a look at that, Jazzy, but I'm completely Linux illiterate.