Computer Guys

[slonezp]

My 6 year old laptop took a crap. My brother-in-law the family IT guy says the hard drive crashed. I bought a new laptop and will be bringing it to him when I have a chance but it won't be soon. In the mean time I'm trying to restore what I can. I have been on the phone with Norton trying to locate my "online backup files". After claiming I never had the backup activated, they found them but it seems they are not downloading. I was told 2-3 days. After 36 hours it still shows 0.1% downloaded. The CS call center appears to be not in the United States and the CS reps seem to know as little as I do about computers. As far as pictures, I have a photobuckrt account. Can I retrieve my old fishing pics? Maybe put them in a folder or something? Can't figure out the iTunes. I probably lost all that??? Can I get my Office 2007 back?

Any advice for the future in case this happens again?

Thanks

[NateFollmer]

Go purchase an external hard drive enclosure (one for laptop drives - 2.5"), get the hard drive out of the old laptop and hook it up to the new laptop and see if you can get any files off. Sometimes after crashes, you may not be able to boot up a pc, but you still can get files off with another pc.

The hard drive should come out from a door or something on the side, very easy to get out on a laptop.

You can download your photobucket photos no problem, they will always be available, so no worries.

Did you purchase songs from itunes or did you get them elsewhere? Songs you bought from itunes will carry over, ones you didn't won't. Just have to log in to itunes with your account and you'll have whatever you bought.

Office is gone unless you have the cd or license keys. If you have the key, microsoft will usually send you a new cd or download link.

Crashes aren't a matter of if, it's when. I backup my hard drives every week. I have an external USB hard drive that stores all my back ups. Windows 7 offers a back up system built in, so I just use that.

[SirSnookalot]

First of all I trust no one or any on line company to back up my data. I always made a point of backing up my system everyday ( when I was in business , going back to my first puter early 90's ). I understand using on line back up if one has a lot of employees, some one will always forget. Once I retired and my recent data is not as important I back up to a cd once a week, in fact i use 2 cds in case 1 is lost or gets corrupted.

Good luck in getting your files.

[GrundleLove]

photobucket is fine since its online and has nothing to do with your physical computer.

what do you mean its "crashed"? is it dead dead? or is the windows file just corrupted and a "chkdsk "X:: /r" could probably fix that if it is the case. are you getting a Blue screen on boot up? or a message that says "unmountable boot volume"? so many times i have people come into my work for a dead computer but it never turns out dead...just the windows MBR is ***** up, which can be fixed. but that being said it is a 6 year old laptop and the average lifespan of PC laptops is about 3 years. so...ya...its old.

If its dead dead then getting data off of it will be still to none unless you wanna pay thousands of dollars at a data recovery place, which i highly doubt. If it had bad sectors but you can still read the drive externally then you should be able to get certain data, but maybe not all. you can also get your office 2007 key from the old HDD using certain software i.e. Produkey. But it is technically not allowed by microsoft ( and i think illegal because we are not allowed to tell people at work for liability reasons) to put a single user liceanse that has already been installed and activated on a seperate machine. Unless you were reffering to your office docs...i.e. excel files, word files, powerpoint and outlook PST files, if the drive can not be read then yes you will lose them.

Itunes is a program, so when you say "itunes" i am assuming you mean music and videos that you play in itunes. those will be on the HDD in the Itunes media folder (if you can access it)

I mean in all honesty, there is a good chance this can be fixed. Like i said before saying "the HDD is bad/gone" is a pretty easy out. What I am going to assume he did was look at whatever error message you were getting on boot up and assume it was that. Without a proper diag by removing the HDD and putting it in a sled, there is no way in saying that it is 100% the HDD. It literally could be as simple as a check disk. Before you do all this mass recovery and talk to Ishkabibble from Norton in Indonesia, I would have it properly diagnosed by a computer shop.