The other day I mentioned that my hard drive died and I lost all of the song ratings and play counts from my iTunes library. Some people made some excellent suggestions in the comments about how I might be able to rescue that data. As it turns out, fate was on my side. I had already burned an Ubuntu live CD so that I could test some hardware I had bought before my new Windows XP CD arrived via UPS, and I tried booting up the PC with the dead hard drive from that. Well, I stuck the CD in the machine too late, and it booted up into Windows instead of playing dead. I quickly zipped up the files I needed and used scp to copy them to a server, and ten minutes later I had the old iTunes data on the new PC.