my work laptop died what do i do

[g0zer]

my work laptop just died stopped dead kaput no warning and there are no signs of life what do i do?

im a bit paniced, this is my uber 17.3inch laptop that has all my virtual machines on it. i have the short term problem to deal with especially need to recover my WIN7 outlook for work tomorrow and a longer term problem that i dont want to deal with replacing the laptop from scratch cos of the time ive spent configuring and proofing the virtual machines for PLC interfacing/networking they have e-keys for the development packages loaded in as well that make it even more of a head fuck.

this machine got drowned by laotians and subsequently repaired. i remember thinking at the time having water running out of the fan ports wouldnt do its longevity much good

[SilentBob]

Pull the hard drive out, plug it into an external USB case. See if you can read it. If you can copy the virtual machines off. They are just giant files anyway.
Copy VMs back on to new laptop.

[g0zer]

hmm i hadnt thought of that, you know how normally e keys dont copy so good unless you ghost a machine im not so hip with piracy these days but since they are on a virtual machine that might work.

[SilentBob]

Well in this case you aren't copying keys. And you are going beyond ghosting a drive. You are copying an entire machine, well a virtual one.
Tough part is making sure you can read your drive. Easy street from that point I reckon.

[Cam]

Yup, what SB said. If you can recover your VM's from the drive, you could be right as rain.

Good luck.

[g0zer]

mm i am pretty sure the drive will be ok. but migrating the VMs will be harder than reading them and migrating the primary WIN7 OS onto a new hardware platform could also be messy.

i wonder how long it will take to repair, if its a day to get a mainboard and a day of getting to it it would be good and a repair shop wont need the hdd

[WIGARUS]

g0zer without a fancy laptop can't spell or punctuate for shit.

[lee]

pic related cos it has a laptop in it

[WIGARUS]

Yep, totally serious.

[dolph]

Mine did this to me recently. Gave it to the IT guy who pulled the battery out and let it sit for 48 hours. Something about the machine resetting itself.
Well it worked as the lappy is back and working and he didn't charge me, so I know he didn't do anything...

[Desmo]

Just recover it all from backup.

[g0zer]

backup

*cry*

[Nath]

Give us a call if you need a hand, also got an external drive bay you can use to recover the disk.

[g0zer]

i decided to drop it off complete to a repair shop, looked like by the time i figured out how to migrate the primary OS onto another platform and migrate the VMs and then did it a shop could rebuild the original machine even if they had to order in and replace everything in it. sprint also reminded me that our email server is not like a home account (where emails are wiped when you download them) so that solved my short term communications problem cheers sprint.

am running my trusty old NEC for the time being, i suppose i should do some work now

[SilentBob]

I don't get it it. It sounded like all the important stuff was in the VMs not in the primary host OS. Why would you even bother migrating the host OS?
Just chuck the VM files on a brand new installation of Win7 with the VM software installed and you're away.

[Desmo]

*cry*

I was being facetious, but I already knew the answer

[shmoo]

Stuff that is SOOO vital that you'd die if you lost it.....but no backup? Why do people keep doing this to themselves? A 500gb external hard drive as a dedicated backup drive costs what??? $79 if that?

[g0zer]

I don't get it it. It sounded like all the important stuff was in the VMs not in the primary host OS. Why would you even bother migrating the host OS?
Just chuck the VM files on a brand new installation of Win7 with the VM software installed and you're away.

i dont understand how win7 integrates shared resources and its logon with the VM's and uhhh my HP has a finger swipe scanner.. which means i no longer remember my logon or password

ironically enough, i built our office server with a raid mirror and a terabyte ghost drive which backups the raid array every night double redundancy backup but i dont backup personally computer problems are what happens to other people not to me!

edit: to save me from the ignominy (no spell check wiggy) in future i will set up a personal ghost drive.

[lee]

Dude shared resources aren't hard to re-setup with VM's. I'm guessing you've set your VM's to auto login, which again means you've got nothing to worry about there. Login and password are irrelevant for data retrieval, unless you've setup bitlocker (file system encryption). You don't need to ghost your whole disk, you just need to incrementally backup changes to your profile/where you store your VM's. The windows backup utility will do this.

If your computer just wont power up at all, it's incredibly unlikely it's the hard disk. I'd still fetch it out of the laptop ASAP and make sure it isn't sitting in water however. If you need a hand I can sort you out with all of it, you just need another laptop or PC to put the data on.

[Cam]

^^^ WLS.

Also, fingerprint logins are brain damaged. Don't do that shit.