Have a laugh on me guys.

Saturday the hard drive crashes (bad sector) and won't re-boot out of recovery mode.  

After several hours a re-install is the only option and 200,000 files and folder fly off into cyberspace.  

2500 boiler manuals, 500 email address, all me work pics the lot  

Ok so 80% is backed up on the other computers, but can you imagine how long thats going to take to transfer  

Anyways, goes off to PC World and buys another laptop on Monday £900 quid  

Spent the rest of monday and Tuesday night installing software etc, and the bloody thing won't read DVD drive  

Back to shop today and says to the guy sort that out, 8hours later I go back he says there's something wrong with it, have another new one.

Ok so this time I haven't lost too much but now I got to start all over again.  

Why they don't make them, Hewlett Packard do.

[quote author=Lurch  link=1125521785/0#1 date=1125525634]It's your own fault for shopping at PC World, I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever. [/quote]

lurch youve forgoten the smillies on your posts
i take it you dont like p c world  

i personaly dont have a clue and hints  as to where not to shop or where to shop would be handy

personally we tend to use a local  vendor who build the pcs themselves for complete pcs (though i didn't for my laptop)

for pc bits accessories etc i either order online or buy in a variety of shops depending on how important it is to have it fast and if i wan't to actually see stuff before i buy it.

Theres also a nice vendor in manchester called morgan who do end of line/surpluss pc stock that we have bought some stuff from before.

[quote author=plugwash  link=1125521785/0#7 date=1125529282]
sounds like you have no idea how to get data off a system that won't boot windows properly and not know anyone who does. (hint: www.knopper.net/knoppix)

also a reinstall done properly shouldn't wipe out all your data do you mean you used one of those shitty recovery cds that big brands ship (a good reason to avoid big brand computers imo) [/quote]

Your right Plugwash I'm certainly not an expert on computers, but in this case the dics was cracked, even the experts couldn't recover it, ok there was a way to retrieve some of the data but at a cost, and as most is backed up on other computers the recovery plus a new hard drive = a new laptop  

[quote author=big_all  link=1125521785/0#4 date=1125528071]i take it you dont like p c world   [/quote]

Shower of bastards, the lot of 'em.

Avoid PC World, Staples, Currys, Comet, Dixons etc...

Go to Dabs, Scan, Insight and a couple of other online retailers.

If you're struggling, Ebuyer and Dell have their moments.

Not exactly a definitive list but that works for me.

[quote author=plugwash  link=1125521785/0#7 date=1125529282]
sounds like you have no idea how to get data off a system that won't boot windows properly and not know anyone who does. (hint: www.knopper.net/knoppix [/quote]

That one's in my collection of essential CD's to carry around, along with the latest versions of AdAware SE, SpywareBlaster, AVG, Avast4Home, Austrumi and Firefox.

It was probably your master RAID usb port conflicting with the RAM.  This can cause defragmentation of your processor causing a memory surge up the rom pipe.

Simple  

I had a similar hard drive failure about a year ago. Decided it was time to sort out a better backup scheme.

The wife and I have out own PC so I set up Norton Ghost to image each PC into a folder/partition on the other PC every night. It takes about 45 mins to image and verify each driver over a simple LAN.

I set it up to:

a) split the image in to 600MByte chunks - so I can copy the backup to CD or DVD if I need to.

b) keep the last 7 nightly and 1 weekly backup and delete the rest automatically - that way the drives never fill up.

c) send me an email when it's done. That way I never  have to check the log files to see if it worked or failed.

Its been running for a year and once set up its the simplest system I've found. You never have to remember to do anythng except leave it switched on.

The risk is that a major power surge could take out both PC so the ocasional DVD copy still has to be made but if you keep putting that off at least you have a backup on a second HD.

mines even easier than that, i dont back up anything!

if my windows/linux box dies on me it gets re-installed with a nice fresh flavour.

I have nothing important I need to back up from my computers, hell it comes in handy at tax return time when a couple of invoices/receipts go missing! lol

btk