I recently repaired a Toshiba Win 7 laptop for a young couple. It would neither boot into Windows nor recognize the "magic key" combination that would allow the restoration from the backup partition. In addition, they foolishly had not created an emergency restore Dvd. After checking the laptop with the Karpasky Rescue 10 CD, I discovered they had numerous malware problems, including the rather difficult "Rootkit Boot.Pihar.b" infection.

Since they did not want to order the restore CDs available from Toshiba and they chiefly used the laptop for online activities as well as the storage of digital images and music, I backed up their important data (2-3 Gb of pictures, docs, and mp3s) so nothing would be lost, installed the newly released Mint 13, and gave it back to them. The last time I checked, they were very happy to have the laptop working again and did not seem to mind not having Windows.


JBlatz