Helping non tech-savvy friends - Need to vent!

[Target Practice]

Okay, little bit of a vent here - don't really think there's anything anyone can do, but needed to release this amongst those that will understand and hopefully sympathise.

It all started with a dodgy hard drive. One of the guys I work with's other half has an Acer netbook that wouldn't boot up because it kept failing to detect the hard drive. Assuming it was most likely a corrupted or outright broken HDD. I said I'd have a look, and whilst I'd do my best to save any documents etc off there, I couldn't guarantee anything.

Anyway, we gave it a crack at work last night to no avail - an attempt to access the hidden restore partition and repair threw up errors that indicated it was an issue with the registry being totally and utterly corrupted, and the only way out was to factory restore.

And then he tried Yahoo! answers. That well-known bastion of semi-knowledge, blowhards and armchair experts. The particular 'expert' he stumbled across had recommended creating a flash drive to dual-boot ubuntu and retrieve the files to a portable HDD that way. Despite my protestations that it was a horrible idea, flawed in its very concept and had no chance of working, he insisted on trying it 'because it can't hurt, can it?'

You know where I'm going with this, don't you?

The ubuntu install failed completely (because the HDD is FUBAR), and because we had to repartition the hard-drive to install it, for some reason now the system completely refuses to boot, saying that required files cannot be found. I can't create a system restore disc, because the netbook doesn't have an optical drive, and apparently he managed to bring in the only USB flash drive made in the past three years with a capacity of 1GB, so I can't even use that in place of a DVD!
So now, because he completely ignored my advice (despite asking for it in the first place), I've got a situation where instead of taking the advice of the person he asked, and having to sacrifice a few replaceable documents in order to have a working system, he overruled me in favour of some complete stranger on the internet and has utterly bricked the thing, and somehow I'M expected to bail him out!

ARGH!

 

[Pagey]

I know exactly how you feel.

One thing I would have tried though:

Take the HDD out of the netbook and try it in another PC, see if there was any way to access the drive now the OS isn't being used on it.

To be honest though OS's should force people to make drive images on first startup as lets face it, no one will do it until it's too late and by then it's pointless. Especially on netbooks. XD

 

[something_something]

I know exactly how you feel.

One thing I would have tried though:

Take the HDD out of the netbook and try it in another PC, see if there was any way to access the drive now the OS isn't being used on it.

To be honest though OS's should force people to make drive images on first startup as lets face it, no one will do it until it's too late and by then it's pointless. Especially on netbooks. XD

I have a cheap usb 2.0 screwless hard disk enclosure for 2.5" drives that comes incredibly handy for such tasks. I've used it a couple of times to retrieve data back from corrupted HDDs.