Mageia forum

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...

Sweet! I don't know if it's a first but it's the first I have heard.

Yes, that is the best promotion you can ever get - people whose life was saved will tell it everywhere.

I once visited a guy who ran the visitor & security organisation of a very important art exhibition (a gathering of most of Rembrandt's master pieces in Frankfurt, Germany). He had the accountant figures (entrance fees, man-hours of personnel, etc.) of 2 weeks on his laptop and he was in the same situation as the freind of Max, only that his job was in jeopardy here! I went to the next shop, purchased a replacement for his harddisk and then used my Mandriva Flash to save his data - it took a couple of hours but at the end of the day his job was safe!

We need such success stories, they do the job better than any other marketing material you could think of. At Mandriva we had a page with biz cases where people reported about real cases where they used Mandriva in business. For Mageia we should start a page with such success stories (business and private) with a link to the portal.

EDIT:
I forwarded this to the marketing mailing list: https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia ... 00420.html

I remember having one of those situations a while ago (not with Mageia yet sadly) but that was in work, you have convinced me to carry my Live USB wherever I go from now on!

It's amazing how much interest people have once Linux has saved the day

Good work spreading the joy