So i left last week for vacation. my wife had a lady sit our house while we were gone. feed dogs cat and bearded dragons. so we come home pets have not been fed house is a wreck. few hours go by i am looking for my laptop i let her use with all my tuning stuff BE/ EEC/ TUNER PRO. and my cbaza def,s from pops racing that i paid 200 bucks for. so i call she commences to lying that she doesn't know were its at. I threaten her i am calling the cops. she calls back saying it accidentally got put in her bag. said she would bring it by. i get off work yesterday. come home computer is here and will not even load windows.
i called her and lost my cool after her lies and was going to call the police and file charges for her taking the computer. after a few hours of back and forth . she came by and told me and the wife she was looking at porn on my laptop and after shutting it down it would not start back up. and said she got scared. and took the laptop. so i take the computer to computer guy and windows is screwed and needs to be re installed after trying system recovery and system restore to no avail. now i am going to lose all my def files. is there any thing i can do to recover my be/eec/ and my pops racing defs. thanks for any input

Stressed!!!!.

...and this is why there is Acronis and external USB harddrives. It's a little late now, but with Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, you can make FULL images of harddrives or just partitions. So if the HD goes bad, you buy another of equal or greater size, and Acronis restores the entire drive back like it was backed up. But to do that, you do need a fairly large external USB HD. The 1TB drives used to be pricey, but you can get them for as low as $80. The 2TB and even 3TB drives are going for reasonable prices now too. The smaller, more compact external drives don't even require a power supply...just use the USB port for power. But you'll still pay a little more for them.

Again, it's after the fact now. But for anybody else reading this, I HIGHLY recommend Acronis True Image Echo Workstation backup/restore utility. It's saved me numerous hours of reinstalls at work and once on my old personal laptop when its HD went out. For anybody that does buy it, make sure the software you are purchasing creates a bootable CD. You launch and run Acronis from its own launch environment. It is NOT something you install in Windows. Windows cannot be running to make image backups. Also you want to make sure to select to verify the backup immediately after. I have had 1 backup that was bad and I didn't know it until I went to restore from it. I had to instead restore from an earlier state. Since then, I've learned to let the computer take the time to walk the backup and verify it is good.

Of all the backup softwares I've ever used, I've never had one that worked as well as Acronis True Image Echo does for me.

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...Always Somethin'

89 Ranger Supercab, 331 w/GT40p heads, ported Explorer lower, Crane Powermax 2020 cam, 1.6RRs, FMS Explorer (GT40p) headers, Slot Style MAF, aftermarket T5 'Z-Spec', 8.8" rear w/3.27s, Powertrax Locker, Innovate LC-1, GUFB, Moates QuarterHorse tuned using BE&EA

Member V8-Ranger.com

Thanks cgrey Ill make sure to do this when i get it fixxed this week. hopefully ill be able to just send them my computer code and they can resend me my codes for be/ and eec/ but not sure if Adam will. ill just have to ask him. thanks for the input

If you still have your registration numbers and you remember EXACTLY how you spelled your username in BE when you setup to register it (it's case sensitive), then you can probably reinstall and get it to relicense. I don't believe Clint triggers off the HD since that is a common component to go bad and be replaced. If BE/EA re-register correctly, then your def file licenses should also...again assuming you have records of exactly how you registered BE/EA and the license key that Clint sent back to you to license the software.

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...Always Somethin'

89 Ranger Supercab, 331 w/GT40p heads, ported Explorer lower, Crane Powermax 2020 cam, 1.6RRs, FMS Explorer (GT40p) headers, Slot Style MAF, aftermarket T5 'Z-Spec', 8.8" rear w/3.27s, Powertrax Locker, Innovate LC-1, GUFB, Moates QuarterHorse tuned using BE&EA

Member V8-Ranger.com

Thankfully my wifes computer guy restored everything on my laptop and i lost no memory!!!! he said the run of the mill computer guy would have lost all the memory but thankfully he worked for microsoft for 20 years =) <~~~ very gratefull!=) he backed up my computer and everything for 50 bucks! wheeew!

Did he give any kind of indication as to what got jacked up?

Now that it is fixed, look into the backup software I talked about. And get a big external drive. I found a 2TB USB 3.0 one on newegg for $110 shipped.

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...Always Somethin'

89 Ranger Supercab, 331 w/GT40p heads, ported Explorer lower, Crane Powermax 2020 cam, 1.6RRs, FMS Explorer (GT40p) headers, Slot Style MAF, aftermarket T5 'Z-Spec', 8.8" rear w/3.27s, Powertrax Locker, Innovate LC-1, GUFB, Moates QuarterHorse tuned using BE&EA

Member V8-Ranger.com

i did it all today with the acronis software. thanks cgrey!

One other little tip worth mentioning: Enabling a password for logon to windows would also probably have avoided this problem (as long as the password wasn't something like 'password'). If housesitter couldn't surf porn on the laptop she likely couldn't have caught whatever killed the Windows install.

This has nothing to do with using hard drive backup software, which I agree completely with: I've used both Norton Ghost and DriveSnapshot at work, and have talked to folks who use Acronis as well. They all work, and they all can save your bacon (and your BE setup) in the event of just about anything short of a motherboard failure.

We have an enabled password on everything computer in the house but the media box on the TV set. I should probably set one up there too, but I don't like to have to mess with a keyboard to watch TV.

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1999 Mercury Grand Marquis LS HPP with mild mods

another little tip... Don't use an admin account for daily use. If you don't want to password protect your account that's fine, set it as a standard user. Password protect your admin account. This setup works extremely well in Vista/7; you just get prompted for your admin password if it's necessary for some function.

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1978 Mustang II King Cobra
89 5.0HO, Stock Short Block, Edelbrock 4bbl aluminum intake, Holley 650 double pumper, MSD 6AL, Ford F303 cam, 1.7:1 Crane Roller Rockers, Pocket Ported stock heads, Hedman Long Tube Headers
5 spd Manual
Full roll cage, 9" full floater w/Currie trac lock/373 gears, RCI Fuel Cell
Project Page: http://www.brandttuning.com/projects.htm

I wasn't going to go there just because I knew that a lot of people here are running older hardware and OS that don't respond so well to user level privs versus admin level privs for the user on the system.

Also have no idea how BE and EA play with user privs. I'm guessing you have to set up as admin and can then drop the priv level back to user for normal operation.

Do agree, though that it's a lot easier with Vista/win 7 because of how much better integrated the Microsoft version of sudo is. We've got one win7 box in the house and it essentially never gets used under an admin account. Works great and is much less likely to catch something nasty.

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1999 Mercury Grand Marquis LS HPP with mild mods

I'm much more lazy and prefer to be admin all the time. Yeah it does leave me vulnerable to getting stuff on the machine, but that's why I have backups. So I justify it in that the time I save by always being admin vs fiddling with Windows "sudo" is worth the time I take doing the Acronis backups...and I am adamant about backups. If my laptop got a virus today, I could revert to an Acronis backup and what I lost would be minimal (few datalogs and some experimental versions of BE that aren't yet released).

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...Always Somethin'

89 Ranger Supercab, 331 w/GT40p heads, ported Explorer lower, Crane Powermax 2020 cam, 1.6RRs, FMS Explorer (GT40p) headers, Slot Style MAF, aftermarket T5 'Z-Spec', 8.8" rear w/3.27s, Powertrax Locker, Innovate LC-1, GUFB, Moates QuarterHorse tuned using BE&EA

Member V8-Ranger.com