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ok this is a compliicated one so hears the deal
i spent 6 hours working on a file in windows. a word document. i only save it to my flash drive. my flash drive breaks. i try to recover it off of windows, but its a piece of crap and windows wont load. so i resort to the trump card, ubuntu. obviously ubuntu live cd loads. now the problem is that i dont know how to recover my file on ubuntu. i know very little about it. what i do know is its usefull. so can anyone help me?

That's like walking (walking!) into a mechanic's shop, and saying "My car's not starting, what do you suggest I do?". The quick answer is: "put your key in the ignition and turn it".
In that vein, the equivalent for Ubuntu would be to insert the USB key, and -- if it's in reasonably usable shap -- Ubuntu will open a windown on the key, and you can navigate to your word file and open it (OpenOffice is far more forgiving of 'broken' word files than MS Office is), then save it somewhere else.

If that doesn't work then you're probably gonna have to push the car into the shop for them to look at that. For Linux, it's actually possible for me to direct you so that I (or anybody else who knows (s)what he's doing) can login to your box and figure out what's so.

The really big question, however, is 'how broken is the USB and how broken is the document file?'. Depending on the answer to that question, it could be anything from a 10 minute to a 10 hour task to recover your file. (( but probably closer to 10 minuted if it's recoverable at all )).

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If the US is the world's policeman, Canada must be the world's ambulance driver.