[pharoahegypt]

It's the people who lose years of photographs and music that I feel sorry for.

I had a woman in the other day, her laptop was in a right state, and try as I might I just couldn't retrieve her data, even though I did rescue her laptop back to its normal usable state in time. She told me (through a flood of tears) that this had meant her losing pictures of her recently diseased father, and she hadn't been prudent enough to back-up those images as yet. Others have spent days ripping all their CD's to I-Tunes or WMPlayer etc, only to lose it all just after they've sold on or binned all their shelf space hungry CD's.

I put the issue down to yet another moody update for Win8.1, and it's only the most recent of dozens where this one update has forced the users laptop into an unending recovery loop, and a blue screen where none of the 3 options work. The only option was to force recovery via F4, and this sadly doesn't always allow for saving of data, more so when the user has already tried several times to fix the error themselves. Oddly, this error won't allow me to boot to a disc containing a VirtualOS where I can retrieve data like usual, and it's as frustrating for me as it is upsetting for clients.