My father-in-law recently had a surgery, and so my wife
spent the two days at the hospital with her father. And
since her mother is pretty far along in her Parkinson's, I
stayed with her mother and kept her company.
In our somewhat ranging conversations it came up that she
didn't know the password to her laptop and so she was
locked out of files she wanted. I had heard of this problem
in the past and told her that I thought I could get the
files out with the magic of Linux, but I guess she finally
wanted the files badly enough, or maybe her trust in me was
raised enough from the time commitment I was showing in
being there.
So after the second day, I took the laptop home to work on.
There was no rush to get it back, but I thought it would be
a nice, easy project to work on as I de-stressed from
mistiming my return home and hitting the full length of
rush-hour traffic for my metropolitan area -- my
mother-in-law lives in the far north of it, and we live in
the south.
The easy part.
I simply ran Linux Mint as a live disk, mounted the
Window's file structure, copied all of the files over to
another USB stick, then installed Mint on the the computer,
wiping the Windows (... 7) and then flashed the files back
over. The thing now takes forever to boot, but once it
does, everything runs smoothly, and Libre Office does a
great job opening and displaying everything she had.
The hard part.
I was working on this after we had put our daughter to bed,
but then my wife got a call to return to the hospital. What
we know now: there was unexpected internal bleeding and the
blood thinners he was on made him bleed out. It all
happened very quickly.
That was nine days ago, and I am only getting time to catch
up and write about it now. There was a funeral to plan,
family to coordinate with and visit with. I have been able
to deliver the restored computer, and we were able to find
a file called "in case of my death" which has been and will
continue to be a help in getting the financial side worked
through. My wife also made a beautiful slide show video of
her father's photos, which rendered to mp4, and we were
able to get that saved to the computer and set up where her
mother can see it whenever she wants.
Technology, serving human needs. Not the other way around.
==
This work is hereby in the public domain.
Do what you want with it.
