{"id":134,"date":"2007-09-12T16:24:50","date_gmt":"2007-09-12T20:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/09\/12\/ubcd-its-magic\/"},"modified":"2007-09-12T16:24:50","modified_gmt":"2007-09-12T20:24:50","slug":"ubcd-its-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/09\/12\/ubcd-its-magic\/","title":{"rendered":"UBCD: It’s Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Ultimate Boot CD<\/a> (UBCD) is worth its weight in gold. (Err, I guess that’s not a grand compliment given the weight of a CD. Let’s instead say that, had I paid $200 for it, I don’t think I’d regret it.)<\/p>\n

Least year I accidentally hosed the bootloader on my laptop. All my data was, in theory, intact, but all I got when turning my computer on was “OS not found,” which is very scary<\/strong> on a live system with important data on it. I tried all sorts of complex stuff, before I remembered that I had the UBCD. I booted it up, selected “Partition Tools,” and found a program that automagically restored my bootloader.<\/p>\n

Monday night, one of my professors explained that he was just given a used laptop, and that it was all well and good except that he didn’t know the password. (And it was a WinXP machine where you need one.) I volunteered to help because he’s a really nice guy and, well, it can never hurt to be on a professor’s good side.<\/p>\n

It took me about two minutes, and most of that was waiting for things to load. It includes a utility<\/a> that let me just blank the password in the registry. It was kind of unceremonious, but I rebooted, ejected the CD, and then got the windows login screen. I just hit enter, logging in with no password, and it worked!<\/p>\n

Of course then I spent an hour uninstalling old junk and downloading updates. As I sat there, he asked if I’d come help out a friend at his office–who would pay me–who was having similar problems. I agreed, and he called them, telling them that the FBI might be looking for me, but as long as I wasn’t caught beforehand, we’d be coming by another day to help him.<\/p>\n

It’s got all of those utilities that come in handy when you’re absolutely desperate. I think I could make serious money on the side helping people with problems like this. And best of all, it just works<\/em>. Oh, and it’s free.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is worth its weight in gold. (Err, I guess that’s not a grand compliment given the weight of a CD. Let’s instead say that, had I paid … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-cool-links","category-hero-of-the-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}