How To Add Your Own Folders To The Places Bar Or Favorite Links.in windows VISTA , windows 7

Whenever you create a new file, open a new file or save a new file, you are presented with a File Dialog Box, where you can save the files. On its LHS are mentioned standard locations or places like Desktop, Computers, Pictures, etc, which are easily accessible. This is called as the Places Bar or the Favourites Links in Windows 7 & Vista.
You can with this tip, add your desired custom shortcuts to Open and Save dialog boxes in Vista.
Open Explorer and navigate to folder C:\Users\Owner\Links, where, Owner is Your Name. Rt click in the window pane and choose New > Create Shortcut. Paste the path of the folder, which you are desirous of adding > Next > Give Shortcut a Name > Finish. Your Places Box will now show the custom desired places ! WinVistaClub / Downloads have been added this way, below.

There are other ways too for doing this.
1) Open Registry Editor and navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\Placesbar

Rt click on the Place0 in RHS pane and click on Modify. Add the desired folder path in Value Data and click OK. Do so similarly for other places.
2) The places bar can also be changed using Group Policy. To do so, Type gpedit.msc in Start Search Bar and hit enter. Navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Common Open File Dialog > Items Displayed In Places Bar.

Click on Display Properties, to open its Dialog Box. Select Configured, and add the folder paths in the boxes provided. Click Apply > OK.

In Windows 7 & Vista, this policy change setting will apply only to applications that are using the XP style common dialog box and not to the new Windows common dialog box style!
Alternatively, there are various small applications which are also available, the PlacesBar Editor being one where you can customize Vista as well as Office Dialog Places. Some other freeware are Shell Places Bar Editor, PlaceBar Constructor, & PlacesBar Tweaker.

Data recovery the quick and easy way with ubuntu desktop linux ubuntu 9.04 without comments

Ever had a failing disk? Using some hard drive recovery tools we can make salvaging our valueble data something possible.
Using dd_rescue we are going to make an image of the hard drive onto a reliable storage area, then we can run whatever filesystem recovery utilities we want.

The beauty of ddrescue is that it is fully automated and will rescue all the blocks that it can read successfully on the first pass, and with any bad blocks it will come back and retry as much as possible.

Install ddrescue tools
sudo apt-get install ddrescue

Connect the failed disk to your system
By either plugging the drive directly into system, or using one of those usb enclosure or slotted drive device you’ll need to have your failing hard disk connected and unmounted before we can begin.

sudo dd_rescue /dev/sdb disk-image.img

mnk0@earth:~$ sudo dd_rescue /dev/sdb disk-image.img
[sudo] password for mnk0:
Summary for /dev/sdb -> disk-image.img:r: 0.0k, succxfer: 228352.0k
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 229376.0k, opos: 229376.0k, xferd: 229376.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 229376.0k
+curr.rate: 26249kB/s, avg.rate: 28391kB/s, avg.load: 13.5%

We can now mount this image on our system and take a look at the files.

mount -t ext3 -o loop disk-image.img /mnt/tmp