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major disaster, help required, hdd prob
hey oop, half way through cutting a job that has to be installed tomorrow and some idiot left his coffee too close to the laptop, you can guess the rest, did a forced shut down and spent the next two hours cleaning out and drying out my in pieces laptop,
got it back together enough to fire it up, and the screen was so feint i couldnt see to even insert my password after start up,
finally got that working (on its own) and the hdd would boot,
soo, down to pc world, found the new boy who eventually found me a laptop hdd case etc, ran home and connected all up to lucy’s (the mrs -ish) laptop,
it is found as new hardware, and i can browse it, but it wont let me into my files due to them being password protected (user password, not individual files). the guy who did know what he was doing in pcworld said this may happen, so i should put it into lucys laptop and disable the passwords,
cant do that, insert my drive and it wants me to activate windows, follow the instructions on the phone, and it wont have it, not valid, eventually i explain to ‘mary’ from the punjab that it is my hard drive, registered to my laptop, but my laptop is temp out of action, and i’m putting my had drive into my mrs’s laptop to enable me to fnish my work,
oh no, i need my product key but it wont if it’s reg’d to another pc etc etc,
soooo, the long and the short of the remainder of this finely detailed depiction of this evenings events, …..
is….
now i’m back on lucy’s laptop with her drive inserted, and mine as an aux drive, how can i get into my password protected ‘user’ area ? i want to somehow disable the passwords externally,
any ideas ?
if i cant do this, i’ll be installing corel and winplot, before spending an evening redrawing a load of work and cutting through the night !
please help !
my mobile number (please let this run mods 🙁 ) is 07899 755120 i’ll call you right back, thanks
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11 Replies
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Have you tried setting up a user on the new laptop, with your user name and password?
Nick
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i just been on the phone to him folks.. trying something at the moment
what can I say.. the monkey! -
Hope you get it all sorted Hugh.
It’s probably a daft question but can you not just copy (using windows explorer) all the artwork files from your damaged laptop over onto the new PCs hard drive then install the design software onto the new PC before trying to open them?
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many thanks dave, you were right about the pssword thing, still couldnt access it, so luck i did as you suggested and moved the required customer files to a location i could get them,
for some reason this lappy wouldnt play ball with the cutter etc, so i re-installed the mrs drive, then had to use mine as an external again, reloaded corel and winplot into here, and installed the cutter, finaly got cutting !
literally just walked back through the door, finshed 4 jobs in the end (amazing how much more i get done at night !!) cos i think the mrs has to take this lappy to work today,
will retry my lappy tonight, it wouldnt even try to light the screen or fire the hdd last night,
Phil, the prob is that my user account is password protected, and even by removing that password, i still cannot gin external accss to the drive, hence……
damn, seeing double and sruggling to type now, far to many overnighters recently !
thanks again to those who offered help.
Hugh
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Having had this problem in the past, I turn off encryption on all my computers (personal and work).
It might be less secure, but it is certainly easier when (not if) a computer breaks down.
I have had more problems fans failing than anything else, resulting in cooked processors and motherboards. At least I can put the old drive in the new machine and copy the data.
I don’t know if I can still do that with the new raid setup though.
Ivan
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Are you using Windows XP?
If so, I had an issue with a removable hard drive and a copy of a back up a little while ago when I reformatted my PC.
The backed up/restored files were accessible, but I could not open or use them because the "ownership" of the computer changed. It was a simple fix though. Right mouse click on the files or folders and select properties. Then click on the security tab, and advanced settings button. From there, click on the owner tab and assume ownership of the files.Good luck,
Checkers
a.k.a. Brian Born
Harrisburg, PA USA -
no worries hugh.
exactly checkers… that was the problem.. however XP HOME doesn’t have a security option.
The only way I could get access to his files with TWO laptops with one USB harddrive is to boot his own harddrive in the mrs computer but go into Safe Mode… this bypasses activation and then he can login and move the files away from documents and settings.
I think ur gonna struggle to get the laptop working again after what u described… any constrilation, i once wrapped the laptop power lead around my foot and my laptop went flying, it cracked the motherboard slightly but couldn’t see it…
I got another motherboard off eBay and put that in… works fine now and cost me about £150
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it’s kinda working now, it turns on, the hdd does something, the cd drive does something, the screen blips, and it turns off !
the hdd drive is fine, i’m running that aux now on this lappy to get access to files etc,
think i’ll have to go down to pc world and buy the latest £300 managers special and run my drive in it til i get the good one fixed !
thanks again for all your help Dave,
i might be a little limited with my appearences here, only got this laptop while mrs hugh is at work !
cheers.
H -
Sorry to hear of your misfortune! Just be careful down at PC World, they’re not unknown to try to sell you something you don’t need! (Being VERY careful what I say lol! I’ve never been a Dixons group fan).
I keep all my artwork on an external 30gb laptop disk with nothing else on it! I then use a program called FolderMatch to make a duplicate on my server which is backed up to tape every night! I keep my frequently used stuff like my stock database, contacts and work in progress on my USB pen too, that way I have 3 copies of the current work and 2 copies plus a nightly backup of my vectors and past work. May be a bit overkill, but I’d hate to loose it all.
All that doesn’t help when I leave my external hard disk where I was working last week, so I’ve had to get the current cover engineer to take it home and I’ll have to meet up with him to get it! DOH!
Always make a backup! Even a 1GB SD card is feasable these days, they’re so robust and so portable. You can even get a USB pen drive style reader for them. If your system dies, you wouldn’t have your software / cutter drivers backed up, but those are easy enough to install again. It’s a lot more difficult to re-create all your work!
Adam
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you’re not wrong there adam !! re dixons group, i nly go in there when i know what i want ! but it and run !!
as for back up, i’ve been meaning to have a spare drive for a while, since the last time i spilled coffee on it to be precise !!
not sure i’d get what i want on a 1gb card though my ‘vector’ file as i call it, has all my customer art, vectors, clip art files, you name it, the file is huge ! when i was going to copy it to another area ofthe disk, to enable me to access it all, it was going to take an hour and a half to move it all ! so i just moved the customer work folder, wont be long before i need more !
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You can pick up an external 40Gb drive for around £60 on the web. I tend to use Aria, but eBuyer etc will have similar pricing. Then all you need to do is copy your data to it! and / or user something like foldermatch to synchronise it on a regular basis.
Adam
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