I think yesterday I made history, in a small way.
My friend has a Windows 7 netbook whose hard drive had died. He couldn't get it to boot, and it made a terrible noise when trying to read the hard drive. He asked me for advice, and I said, "well, you need to take it in for service. That's a hardware problem."
He looked at me sadly and said, "But what about my data? It will all be lost?"
I responded with a chirpy "Yup!" and reminded him of the 3 rules of computing: backup, backup, backup.
But then I had an idea! I had my Mageia 1 Live USB with me! (Doesn't everybody?)
I plugged it in, booted it up and it had a little trouble at first with his hard drive, but eventually it mounted and we were able to retrieve about 90% of his data.
He was so impressed that I made him a Live USB (with my laptop) so he can install Mageia 1 when he gets his netbook back from the shop.
And so, only two weeks old, Mageia 1 has saved the day, rescued a Windows user from his follies and made a true convert.
Is this the first time that a Mageia Live has been used to recover data? I used to do this all the time with my Mandriva Live USBs...