Like many people in the past I didn't backup my machines as often as I should. I got pretty religious about it a few months ago when working on a new laptop for work. I've owned Acronis
True Image for years, and I set it to do daily backups. It's a good thing, as this saved my bacon.
The optical drive went out in my personal laptop. It would read CDs, but not DVDs. So I took it back to Best Buy. When I bought it I got the Product Service Plan for it. I know, I know, they get a lot of flack, but I don't care. They save me trouble. I dropped the laptop off at Best Buy (after making a backup, of course) and told them it couldn't read DVDs. They fire it up and Vista hangs at the scrolling bar. I tell them not to worry about that, Vista is fussy and I've got a good backup. I'll take care of Vista when I get the laptop back. I sign the paperwork and go on my merry way.
I get a call yesterday that my laptop is fixed. They'd replaced the optical drive (good) and the hard drive (huh?). I didn't think much of it, since I have my backups. I picked my laptop up today and brought it home. I fired it up and put my True Image CD in. The BIOS complained about a hard drive error. I figured that was because the drive had been changed. Once True Image got loaded up it too complained that there was no hard drive. That pretty much ruled out any chance of me restoring anything. I poked around a little and couldn't get the hard drive to show up. Back to Best Buy I go.
I took it to the Geek Squad and told them the story. They tested the new drive and verified that it was broken. Essentially the service center had swapped my perfectly good drive for a broken one, then never so much as turned the laptop on to see if it worked. Even though I was standing in a store that sells computer hardware, they didn't have a hard drive in stock to replace the bad one they put in my laptop. So it's back to the service center for my laptop. Yup, back to the people that caused this problem in the first place.
I left Best Buy this evening without my laptop, and it'll probably be gone another two weeks. I'm pretty frustrated that this was all because they replaced something that didn't need replacing. I do feel better though because I do have full backups, though. And with True Image I can mount the backup and pull files off if I need. This situation sucks, but it sucks a lot less because of my backups.
Thanks for letting me vent. :)
tk