Singing magnets are bad for laptops
Unfortunately my younger kid dropped a pair of singing magnets (rattlesnake eggs, oids, whatever you prefer to call them) onto his laptop. The hematite toys are very strong magnets so their brief enounter with the laptop, barely a few millimetres above the hard drive, made a mess of the system. Massive data corruption and potentially a head crash puts the future of the drive in doubt. Attempts to rescue the system are failing, but thanks to the Ultimate Boot Disk many of the personal files might be rescued. A re-installation of the OS followed by intensive drive checking is ahead of me.
To archive the data, simply boot the UBD, activate the wifi, change the root password, connect via WinSCP and xfer the important files. Disk failures will prevent some transfers and unfortunately there’s no easy way to deal with these failures, so just grab what you can.
The lesson: keep those pesky magnets away from laptops!
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