PC Shop messed up my pc

[darren01]

Hi

A few weeks ago i had a problem with my PC crashing,tried everything to get it running as is should, but could not.

 

So i took it to a shop near me that dose PC reapiers,told the chap that the PC was crashing when i tried to run any games on it, So i left it with the shop.

I phoned the shop a week later for him to tell me it was my hard drive that was coursing the problem and I would need a new one put in, Then a few days later I went back to the shop to pick it up and got told it was not my hard drive but my graphics card was the problem, it was shorting out and coursing the hard drive to fail.

 

Ok I said could you fix the Graphic card, sorry no you may have to get a new one ordered in, so I left it again,

Went back the other day to pick it up and was told by the chap in the shop said he could not get a graphic card for it as it was over four years old, so I asked could he get a new mother board from HP, sorry they do not make that mother board any more.

 

So I left with the PC and took it home, it was when I got Home for the shop and turned it on, no longer did I

have windows 7 pro on it anymore, but he had put windows 10 on to it, OK , but when I looked on my hard drive everything I had on the PC had gone, my hard drive was portioned, one being c drive the other which has the windows operating system on is my D drive.

 

looks like the chap had just wiped my PC and installed windows 10, so he could get the driver for the graphic card, and then found out it was nothing to do with the hard drive at all in the first place.

 

So now I have a PC with Windows 10 and every thing I had on this PC is gone for good, it look like he just wiped my Pc and stuck windows 10 on it and did not back up anything that was there.

 

I hate windows 10 and wish he had told me he was going to do this first as I would have told him not to.

 

I went back to the shop and asked him why he had did this with out telling me and he just shrugged his shoulder  and said he had tired to fix it and he said HP (the make of my PC) told him to load windows ten ,so he could get the drivers working again.

All the programmes that came with the pc are all gone, Beats audio, Microsoft word, all my save pass word for all the sites I use, all my games and photos , the bloody lot gone for ever.

 

I liked to know where I stand with this? so any  advice would be most grateful where I can go from here.

Darren

 

[PaulCheffus]

Hi

A few weeks ago i had a problem with my PC crashing,tried everything to get it running as is should, but could not.

 

So i took it to a shop near me that dose PC reapiers,told the chap that the PC was crashing when i tried to run any games on it, So i left it with the shop.

I phoned the shop a week later for him to tell me it was my hard drive that was coursing the problem and I would need a new one put in, Then a few days later I went back to the shop to pick it up and got told it was not my hard drive but my graphics card was the problem, it was shorting out and coursing the hard drive to fail.

 

Ok I said could you fix the Graphic card, sorry no you may have to get a new one ordered in, so I left it again,

Went back the other day to pick it up and was told by the chap in the shop said he could not get a graphic card for it as it was over four years old, so I asked could he get a new mother board from HP, sorry they do not make that mother board any more.

 

So I left with the PC and took it home, it was when I got Home for the shop and turned it on, no longer did I

have windows 7 pro on it anymore, but he had put windows 10 on to it, OK , but when I looked on my hard drive everything I had on the PC had gone, my hard drive was portioned, one being c drive the other which has the windows operating system on is my D drive.

 

looks like the chap had just wiped my PC and installed windows 10, so he could get the driver for the graphic card, and then found out it was nothing to do with the hard drive at all in the first place.

 

So now I have a PC with Windows 10 and every thing I had on this PC is gone for good, it look like he just wiped my Pc and stuck windows 10 on it and did not back up anything that was there.

 

I hate windows 10 and wish he had told me he was going to do this first as I would have told him not to.

 

I went back to the shop and asked him why he had did this with out telling me and he just shrugged his shoulder  and said he had tired to fix it and he said HP (the make of my PC) told him to load windows ten ,so he could get the drivers working again.

All the programmes that came with the pc are all gone, Beats audio, Microsoft word, all my save pass word for all the sites I use, all my games and photos , the bloody lot gone for ever.

 

I liked to know where I stand with this? so any  advice would be most grateful where I can go from here.

Darren

Hi

 

Where is your own backup?

 

Most PC repair shops will have a disclaimer saying they are not responsible for your data and you should back it up before taking it in.

 

Cheers

 

Paul

[2mmMark]

Sadly, this is yet another vivid illustration that the most valuable thing on your PC is the data stored on it.  Back up your data and passwords in two locations!  With some browsers, you can export your passwords to a text file to be printed out.

 

A decent PC technician should have been able to diagnose where the problems were with Darren's PC and before proceeding with any irreversible work, told Darren what they were planning to do, so he had a chance to say don't do it.

 

HP are a bit notorious when it comes to making support of their PCs easy - google "code purple error" for an example - so I have a bit of sympathy with any independent technician faced with one.  I have a couple of HP desktops, well designed physically but not very easy to support. HP's own support teams are, frankly, crap  but there's plenty of good solid advice available on the internet. Tom's Hardware Page for example

 

Belarc Adviser will give you a full technical report on what's in/on your PC, including all the product keys for installed software. Once you know the technical details for your hard disc, disc manufacturers offer specific diagnostic programs to check their products. Belarc would have identified the hardware and drivers could have been obtained from the manufacturers of the cards, even if HP don't keep then any more.

 

The really sad thing is that all the data on the disc of Darrens would have been recoverable had it been installed as the second disc in another PC. After that, it would have been safe to reinstall the operating system, should it be necessary.

 

I think Darren is owed a refund of whatever he paid the PC shop but that's about it, unfortunately.   Really good PC support is time consuming and that won't come cheap. Desktops are now pretty inexpensive so sometimes it's better to get a bare bones PC and just transfer your data across to it.

 

Mark

[Ian J.]

I would suggest getting some legal advice, though it may turn out, as mentioned, that the repair shop have covered themselves in some form of small print. They really shouldn't do anything like wiping HDDs without first checking with you, and they certainly shouldn't upgrade any OS without your express permission. That comes across as idiotic behaviour on their part in my opinion.

 

As for the data, some of it may be recoverable, but only via specialist data recovery companies that charge a lot of money to read HDDs in deep analysis ways. If you haven't got the hundreds, or even thousands of pounds it can cost for them, and you haven't got backups, then it's probable the data's gone for good.

[Bruce Depot]

Recently upgraded my laptop from window 8.1 to 10 and found it required to restore the system to factory settings

to work correctly and so wiped the hard drive, its surprising when you start again just how many things you realise

you did not copy/note...like email addresses, saved websites.

In time you get sorted but I do think laptops/pc´s seem more probmatic now that 10 years ago!

 

Certainly would not be recommending anyone to use this shop mind.

[rockershovel]

I have a box in my loft, containing laptops,memory sticks and external hard drives going back to the early 2000s, and DVDs older than that. I also have a laptop, rather elderly PC and two iPads. Pretty much anything I want, will be there - somewhere.

 

I wouldn't say that there is no unique data on any given machine, but I could afford complete crash of any part of the system without losing much.

[SRman]

I try to hammer this message to students where I work: do your backups. If a hard disk dies, or the computer gets lost or stolen, the work is gone. We do everything we can to safeguard people's work (staff and students), but sometimes even a simple repair can go wrong. There are so many interacting components in a computer that it is not always easy to accurately diagnose the problem. Windows crashing can be caused by faulty hard disks, faulty RAM, or even faulty components on a motherboard, or clashes of drivers for attached devices, or built-in ones such as graphics incorporated as a part of the motherboard. Hard disk manufacturers will guarantee their products but never the data; that is the customer's responsibility.

Personally, I don't recommend HP computers: I have seen far to many things fail on them and the difficulties people have with repairs. That's my own bias and opinion: I'm sure there are others out there who have had good experiences with HP too, so I am not trying to start a war here (I swear by HP laser printers, though).

I do agree the technician should have consulted with Darren if it was possible to do so, but I can also sympathise with the tech in trying to fix the problem, although putting a whole new version of Windows on just to get a driver does seem to be a little OTT. I have the opposite problem in that I cannot get a reliable Windows 10 driver for the Intel graphics on my laptop (ASUS). Thankfully, any games I want to play can use the Nvidia graphics card also installed on the laptop.

[Joseph_Pestell]

Trouble is that any nerd can set himself up as an "expert" on computers. A lot of charlatans out there.

 

But yes, never do anything to a computer without backups of everything.

[Trainshed Terry]

I think it is time to back up MY PC.

[beast66606]

The shops first question should have been

 

"Have you backed up everything that you want ?"

 

before doing anything - except maybe "Good Morning/Afternoon Sir"

[Guest]

I have a box in my loft, containing laptops,memory sticks and external hard drives going back to the early 2000s, and DVDs older than that. I also have a laptop, rather elderly PC and two iPads. Pretty much anything I want, will be there - somewhere.

 

A loft won't be the best place to keep that stuff.

Under the stairs would be better where it won't get alternately cooked and frozen.

[2mmMark]

One more piece of advice I'd offer is to have an alternative way of booting up your PC, either with a bootable DVD/CD or a USB stick.

 

These take a little while to prepare but they can save a lot of angst when your PC won't boot up.

 

Mark

[Ian J.]

Also, although this is shutting the the door after the horse has bolted, it's a good idea to clone the main drive in your computer - this can act as a workable backup of everything on it and how it was all installed, and makes it much easier to restore to another drive in the event of a drive failure. All the operating system settings are retained as well.

 

A good PC tech will create a clone of a drive (if possible) before working on a PC anyway, just to be on the safe side.

[mjkerr]

It seems strange that the repair agent did not remove the faulty Hard Drive, replace with a new one then transfer the data

If the data could not be transferred, then return the faulty Hard Drive explaining the issue

 

Equally, HP normally put the Windows Serial Number on the device

The version of Windows can then be reinstalled, even Windows Vista, so Windows 7 would have been easy

 

Sadly, I agree complete a backup at least once a month, and keep at least the previous three backups

Equally, check the backup device that the data is intact

That way if the computer fails you have the backup, and if the backup fails you have the computer

[Guest]

Sadly, I agree complete a backup at least once a month, and keep at least the previous three backups

Equally, check the backup device that the data is intact

That way if the computer fails you have the backup, and if the backup fails you have the computer

 

Also have one of your backups not in your house.

 

Don't be this guy:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37395526/writer-rushes-into-burning-building-to-save-two-finished-novels

[Ian J.]

Also have one of your backups not in your house.

 

Don't be this guy:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37395526/writer-rushes-into-burning-building-to-save-two-finished-novels

 

Agreed. It's the one use of 'cloud' I advise people to actually make use of. Take the most important of your data (a subset, as the whole lot probably is too big) and put it into some kind of encrypted file (a Truecrypt or Veracrypt .tc would do, hell even a password protected Winzip) then upload that to one of the free cloud services (Microsoft do OneDrive, there's also Dropbox and others available). In that way, your most important data is at least somewhere offsite. With compression, your uploaded file might actually be quite small, particularly the case with text files like novels...

[Jenny Emily]

I keep critical backups on multiple physical drives within this computer (remember - partitioned drives may appear to be separate on your computer, but if the physical drive they are all on fails, you will lose data on all of them) as well as mirrored onto an external USB2 30GB drive, another copy sat on the old computer that I surf the internet on in the shed, and a duplicate on a cloud backup provider.

 

Probably not the most helpful advice after the event, but certainly a +1 for keeping massive amounts of backups. I learnt the hard way many years ago when I lost hundreds of photographs that covered my final year at University and my first year working in the BBC after a hard drive I bought physically failed on me. There is (or at least was) software that can scan a hard disk to try and recover deleted files. I used one back then called 'Lost & Found' to try and retrieve any files that may have resided at one time on another physical drive I had. It would recover files, as long as they had not been physically over written. It was amazing what it could find from prior to deletion, and even prior to formatting and partitioning the drive, but alas files that had been wholly or partly over written were completely gone.

[Ian J.]

...There is (or at least was) software that can scan a hard disk to try and recover deleted files. I used one back then called 'Lost & Found' to try and retrieve any files that may have resided at one time on another physical drive I had. It would recover files, as long as they had not been physically over written. It was amazing what it could find from prior to deletion, and even prior to formatting and partitioning the drive, but alas files that had been wholly or partly over written were completely gone.

 

The specialist data recovery companies can in many cases recover over-written files. They have software and hardware tools that are able to distinguish between the signals of different files. It's the kind of toolset that the Police and GCHQ use to recover information from criminals who deliberately attempt to wipe and over-write their hard drives to hide their nefarious activities. Unfortunately, that also why it's somewhat expensive to use such companies, as they want to make money out of those who have lost their data in situations like this.

[antrobuscp]

The shops first question should have been

 

"Have you backed up everything that you want ?"

 

before doing anything - except maybe "Good Morning/Afternoon Sir"

That is exactly my experience with the repairer I have used when required.

 

My answer has always been - "Yes, it is backed up, but if you can avoid me the work of restoring it all and/or re-installing programs, I'll be grateful"

 

Cloning drives is a good idea before significant work is done.

 

It never ceases to amaze me that people do not back up to other hardware, at least twice, and keep an off-site copy.

 

I "bang on" to my son about this, but does he do it? I think you already know the answer.

 

Colin

[JJGraphics]

That is exactly my experience with the repairer I have used when required.

 

My answer has always been - "Yes, it is backed up, but if you can avoid me the work of restoring it all and/or re-installing programs, I'll be grateful"

 

Cloning drives is a good idea before significant work is done.

 

It never ceases to amaze me that people do not back up to other hardware, at least twice, and keep an off-site copy.

 

I "bang on" to my son about this, but does he do it? I think you already know the answer.

 

Colin

 

 

When I was running my business looking after designers' and printers' computer and imaging systems in the graphics and printing industries, I used to make a serious point about installing the necessary kit to back-up data and also about making sure to rotate copies of the back-ups off-site on a minimum of a weekly basis. There was no "cloud" option until a few years ago, and even if there had been, the internet was – and still is in many cases – far too slow to make the backing-up of the huge volumes of graphics files to the "cloud" a practical proposition.

 

Most of my clients took this very seriously and did what I suggested. One did not, and when his studio was ransaked by burglars who stole his computers, he lost all his data and his business failed as a result. This is a pretty extreme example of what can happen, but it illustrates how serious things can get. It can be just as much of a personal disaster if the storage device in your computer fails or, as in the case of the OP, gets over-written and you lose your personal data, especially those un-replaceable photos. Many people do not realise how traumatic this can be until it happens to them.

 

Even though I am no longer working professionally, I still use the automatic backup on my computer to save work to an external disk automatically and also regularly make two copies of important files like my photographs onto DVDs. One set of the DVDs lives at my daughter's house a few miles away.

 

On the subject of storage devices failing and the importance of backing-up . . . a long-term acquaintance of mine who worked for one of the large hard-disk manufacturers always gave a good bit of advice to anyone asking about the reliability of hard disks. He used to say, "It's not a case of IF a hard disk will fail, but HOW SOON!" He could not have put it any better.

 

Although the quality of storage devices, especially SSDs has improved, they will still all fail at some point, so the message is still: Back-up regularly!

[rockershovel]

A loft won't be the best place to keep that stuff.

Under the stairs would be better where it won't get alternately cooked and frozen.

Figure of speech... the older stuff is in the loft, but the last 5 years or so is in my study. A lot of the older stuff was printed out at the time, I recently had a tax issue and needed to produce information going back to 2007/8 and pretty much all of it existed in hard copy

[antrobuscp]

When I was running my business looking after designers' and printers' computer and imaging systems in the graphics and printing industries, I used to make a serious point about installing the necessary kit to back-up data and also about making sure to rotate copies of the back-ups off-site on a minimum of a weekly basis. There was no "cloud" option until a few years ago, and even if there had been, the internet was – and still is in many cases – far too slow to make the backing-up of the huge volumes of graphics files to the "cloud" a practical proposition.

 

Most of my clients took this very seriously and did what I suggested. One did not, and when his studio was ransaked by burglars who stole his computers, he lost all his data and his business failed as a result. This is a pretty extreme example of what can happen, but it illustrates how serious things can get. It can be just as much of a personal disaster if the storage device in your computer fails or, as in the case of the OP, gets over-written and you lose your personal data, especially those un-replaceable photos. Many people do not realise how traumatic this can be until it happens to them.

 

Even though I am no longer working professionally, I still use the automatic backup on my computer to save work to an external disk automatically and also regularly make two copies of important files like my photographs onto DVDs. One set of the DVDs lives at my daughter's house a few miles away.

 

On the subject of storage devices failing and the importance of backing-up . . . a long-term acquaintance of mine who worked for one of the large hard-disk manufacturers always gave a good bit of advice to anyone asking about the reliability of hard disks. He used to say, "It's not a case of IF a hard disk will fail, but HOW SOON!" He could not have put it any better.

 

Although the quality of storage devices, especially SSDs has improved, they will still all fail at some point, so the message is still: Back-up regularly!

I agree with all of this. When I worked in my main practice, there were daily backups taken off-site. When I started to work from home on my own I felt more vulnerable to data loss and therefore still had daily and weekly backups, but added more frequent periodic archive backups taken on a monthly(nearly) basis. I still had off-site backups but a little less frequent, and I kept a complete second set of hardware as disaster insurance. Now that I've retired, I have restructured my data folders to reduce the volume of data to be included, and now use FreeFilesync to do simpler daily interim backups. I've also reduced the frequency of archive backups. Overall the aim is to provide similar or very slightly reduced cover, with quite a bit less effort.

 

I learned the lessons of data loss many years ago through having one very unreliable pc, and on another occasion having two previously reliable machines lose their hard drives almost at the same time.

 

Colin

[F-UnitMad]

Trying to read the OP, seems the "reapiers" didn't fix the spellchecker, either

 

Coat + hat = gone...

[beast66606]

The ideal backup strategy is

 

daily incremental backups - ie only changed items.

weekly (can be 5 in a month) full backups which get recycled each month (so week 1 is reused in the next months week 1, etc)

monthly - full backups which get kept forever, or at least a year.

 

son / father / grand father style.

 

Generally for PC then

 

For simplicity I would keep the user data in one or two places - this could be a drive, or a root folder (eg - I have "Daves Photo Stuff" as the root of my photos, notes etc). Preferably have it on a different drive to the software drive, then if the software drive fails, it can be replaced/rebuilt and your data is still there, and if the data drive fails, replace it and bring the data back from the backup. Performance will probably be better with multiple separate drives too.

 

Backup your data frequently - how frequently depends on how much you value it - probably a full backup (of the data) at least once a week - but also depends on data size and therefore how much disk you need.

Backup the system (software) each time you make major changes to it (or Windows does!)

 

You can never have too many backups, make sure you have at least duplicates, preferably triplicates or more of each.

 

If you backup to an external drive/anything then periodically check it's still working - if not then make a new backup immediately.

[PaulCheffus]

The ideal backup strategy is

 

daily incremental backups - ie only changed items.

weekly (can be 5 in a month) full backups which get recycled each month (so week 1 is reused in the next months week 1, etc)

monthly - full backups which get kept forever, or at least a year.

 

son / father / grand father style.

 

Generally for PC then

 

For simplicity I would keep the user data in one or two places - this could be a drive, or a root folder (eg - I have "Daves Photo Stuff" as the root of my photos, notes etc). Preferably have it on a different drive to the software drive, then if the software drive fails, it can be replaced/rebuilt and your data is still there, and if the data drive fails, replace it and bring the data back from the backup. Performance will probably be better with multiple separate drives too.

 

Backup your data frequently - how frequently depends on how much you value it - probably a full backup (of the data) at least once a week - but also depends on data size and therefore how much disk you need.

Backup the system (software) each time you make major changes to it (or Windows does!)

 

You can never have too many backups, make sure you have at least duplicates, preferably triplicates or more of each.

 

If you backup to an external drive/anything then periodically check it's still working - if not then make a new backup immediately.

Hi

 

Plus check the backups actually work by restoring them occasionally. There's nothing worse than thinking everything is backed up find the backup is corrupt.

 

Cheers

 

Paul