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| Originally Posted by cgrosart Hi
My old laptop went bang the other day  - have now bought a new one.  The cause of the old one remains a mystery.  An engineer came out to rescue my files but he could not fix the laptop as I did not have any backup disks.  |
This does not mean you have lost your data. It means the engineer was probably a technician and does not know how to get it back.
How important to you is it?
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He recommended that to stop this happening again I should make my own back up disks to re-boot ? the laptop in the event of failure.
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The important thing is to be able to get back your data and the applications which can access it. Booting is optional. You can always find another compiter that boots even if you have to buy one.
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My new laptop from PC World  did not come with disks and I was practically ushered out of the shop once I had bought it to stop me asking any more questions such as 'Why can't I have back up disks ??'
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Two reasons. The cost of backup puts the salesman off mentioning it. Because no one mentions backups the technicians that look after domestic PCs generally have very little clue about it.
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So I have bought 10 blank disks. Now what do I do ???? Please help.
Chris
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Throw the 10 blank discs away and get yourself something like
this
Now find the NT Backup Wizard (XP) and direct a full backup to a file. The File and Setting transfer Wizard is pretty useful for your documents too. You could use something like
Acronis if you want to keep a recoverable image of the PC, but you will need roughly similar hardware to restore to.
And when you install software be careful to keep the disks and serial numbers safe.
HTH