My wife's laptop had a severe hdd crash that took out some vital WindowsXP startup files. Trying the repair option on the Windows CD didn't work as it never prompted for the Admin username/password and therefore wouldn't write to the drive. After trying several options including buying a 1.8" HDD to IDE adapter & looking at the drive in Windows 2000 & WindowsXP I gave up hope that the data could be rescued. As a last resort I booted the drive with a live CD of PCLinuxOS (an operating system I've tried & liked but abandoned because I couldn't get wireless networking to work with encryption). After both W2K & WXP told me the drive was unreadable, there it was all laid out in front of me under Linux. Putting in Mrs. ScottMo's 2GB USB flash drive we were able to save a good portion of her data. I'm going to give PCLinuxOS another go on one of the two dedicated crunchers. Its good to learn a little more about it and have yet another option available when things go bad.

So in short, yeah Linux!