NEWBIE ALERT! Need help with Windows 10 recovery.
- Thread starter Potwizard
- Start date
Patience. Slow down and take a deep breath.
Were you dual-booting PopOS and Windows? PopOS uses a different bootloader (systemd) than what most of us use (grub). You may need to take special care because of that. Or....
If you were not dual-booting, then why PopOS? PopOS seems non-standard in other ways too, so I would probably suggest another distro instead. Or....
If the computer was Windows only, you should simply repair the Windows bootloader with bootrec and then backup your data normally. There is lots of info on the web and Windows forums on how to use bootrec. And....
Do you have another flash drive or external hard drive to store your recovered data? Do you know how much data (MB? GB? TB?) you need to store? It's most likely you can't store it on the PopOS flash drive (depends on how you created it).
People offer advice here from all over the world, so be patient waiting for a response.
And with that, it's my bed time. Good luck!
I used to mess around with Linux back in the day and I used it to fix a boot issue. But that was back in the day before all these new amazing distros to choose from with so many options. What distro would you suggest?
Brickwizard
Well-Known Member
with over 500 to choose from the world is your oyster, do you want linux for general day to day use, or something for business use, or as a server or one of the scientific distributions and so the list go's on,
as its a W10 machine I would assume it will be capable of running any linux, but there are some problems specific to what parts are used, please state make and full model number of your machine
Bwiz
Linux will not fix a Windows boot issue except in a dual-boot system. We still need you to describe better what your current problem is and/or what you want to do. If your Samsung laptop is only running Windows 10 and you want to fix it, you should get a Windows forum (or Google) to help you with bootrec... we don't really do Windows support here.
If you want to recover data from the broken Windows and then replace Windows with Linux, we can probably help with that. As I said before, though, you need to have some idea of how much data you need to recover, and you need the storage space to hold it. Are you prepared for that?
Nearly any Linux distro will probably work to help you with data recovery, but I would usually recommend Linux Mint to someone just getting started with Linux. Linux Mint has 3 different desktop editions: XFCE, MATE, and Cinnamon. They're all good, but I lean toward MATE and Cinnamon editions a bit more. Answering @brickwizard's request will help us to guide you better... and explaining clearly what your situation is and what you want to do.
A page to read:
Finally, an Answer to What is The Best Linux Distro? • Linux Tips
Finally, an attempt to answer to the age old question: Which Linux distro is the best? Read on to find out which distro is the best Linux distro.
linux-tips.us
And:
Will narrow it down quite a bit.
