somewhat urgent help needed (credit on the line)

[shadow1100mfp]

my dell computer is screwed up; it froze when i started a cd burning on itunes (the dvd burner hasn't worked for a while so i hooked up an external cd burner) and i restarted the computer; and it came up with the screen "could not find file (insert file path here)" and says to use the installation disk to repair; the catch is that i didn't receive one with the computer and my windows xp home disk doesn't work when i try it (the computer is running xp media center).

i need this fixed ASAP as my, my sisters, and my parents credit information is on there and it's all saved to that computer; as well as over 30 gigs of music and movies and 5 gigs of family photos.

someone help with what to do! please!

[SomeoneE1se]

find a friend who knows how to burn a disk and boot ubuntu, recover/save everything install ubuntu, or buy a new copy of XP, or call the computer manufacture and find out if the drive has a separate restore partition.  But don't trust those noobs to save your data, do that on your own first Ubuntu!

and let this be a lesson to you, ALWAYS keep a linux live cd in a safe place

[digip]

Have you tried removing the new drive and then rebooting?

[VaKo]

First of all, your data is safe, you just need to use a liveCD or mount the drive on another machine and recover it. This is the easy bit.

Once you have pulled the data off to another machine or disk, you can look at the OS. The fastest way would be to just reinstall the thing, but you can also try repair installs, copying the missing files  back etc Personally I would be inclined to reinstall it at this stage, you have to decide if speed or finese is more important here.

[nicatronTg]

First of all, your data is safe, you just need to use a liveCD or mount the drive on another machine and recover it. This is the easy bit.

Once you have pulled the data off to another machine or disk, you can look at the OS. The fastest way would be to just reinstall the thing, but you can also try repair installs, copying the missing files  back etc Personally I would be inclined to reinstall it at this stage, you have to decide if speed or finese is more important here.

VaKo is right, but the iTunes music is DRM protected, and will not run without that machine.

[Sparda]

You can authorize a new computer, this only works a few times. Ultimately, don't buy DRM'ed music.

[nicatronTg]

You can authorize a new computer, this only works a few times. Ultimately, don't buy DRM'ed music.

Yah, but don't you need to have the other one de-authorized? He should mention if he has all of the other authorized computers used.

[shadow1100mfp]

First of all, your data is safe, you just need to use a liveCD or mount the drive on another machine and recover it. This is the easy bit.

Once you have pulled the data off to another machine or disk, you can look at the OS. The fastest way would be to just reinstall the thing, but you can also try repair installs, copying the missing files  back etc Personally I would be inclined to reinstall it at this stage, you have to decide if speed or finese is more important here.

thats what the people at dell said; they sent me some disks (since they charged us 40 bucks for something that should have come with the computer the guy said hed send us a few so we have a backup)

if the repair doesn't work off of the mediacenter disk that we're getting, ill copy my info to another computer and reinstall windows; but i don't want to do that as i have well over 60 gigs of stuff on that computer and that would mean id need to go buy a new drive.

and none of my music is drm (atleast only a few are, and they're free anyway so i can get them again) the rest i got from cd's i own or other "sources", and i havn't had a chance to back it up for a while because i havn't had time to go buy more dvds (or a hard drive so i don't waste dvds lol)  but as i said, copying (i think it's 35 gigs now but it might be more) of music and movies is pretty troublesome.

[MRGRIM]

Buy a Caddy, buy Ghost. Off you go  :P

Deal with this problem weekly.