BestTechie Forums: shanenin - Viewing Profile - BestTechie Forums

Time just goes by. I started my computer repair business 6 years ago. I knew just a little more then the average geek. I knew how to relaod windows and basic hardware trouble shooting. WE have grown steadily over the years. We moved to a new better location last August. I got a picture of our geeky messy shop. I am proud of it :-)



We also are starting to move into Apple repair. We are very inexperienced with it, but will learn!

I have been hoarding hard drives for our repair business, I think I have a three month supply. I got most of them at a reasonable price :-)

We did an interesting job on an intel 20" imac today. We suspected it had a bad hard drive(verified it with spinrite). It was a pretty easy job removing the hard drive. it was a bit tedious, but not to complicated. Great documentation at ifixit.com. I used my old Gentoo live linux cd to copy the data off the failing drive(has built in read only support for hfs+) . Installed the new drive, installed the OS, then copied the data back to it. If we could do 4 of these jobs per month i would be happy :-)

We have a decent computer repair/service business in the Rochester, MN area. We have never advertised Mac repair, but we do a Mac job every few months. We have done some mother board replacements and a few dc jack board replacements, and hard drive replacements(clients had discs). We are going to start advertising and try and get at the growing Mac business. We hope to go after the easier, more profitable hard drive and os reload jobs. I think all we need to buy are some universal install discs. opposed to some that are for example, only work on the "mac mini". This is where I could use some help. To cover the last 8 years of macs made, what kind of OS discs would we need on hand to cover ourselves. I am just looking for any insight into going into this venture. All comments are greatly appreciated.

I feel uneducated. I have been in the tech business professionally for 5 years giving bad advice and doing some things that may have lost client data. I was under the impression that system restore with xp did not delete personal files/folders. I use it and told clients on a regular basis not to worry about using it, your files will be fine. I noticed a couple of days ago that a folder I created on the root of c: with drivers in it disappeared after running system restore. This behavior also happened with folders on the desktop. Do you guys have any insight to what is going on? A link to a thorough explanation to what files are saved or removed with system restore would be great!

edit added later//

I need to test this, but i think it must filter files based on extension, for example .exe.

edit adder later//

I made a folder on the root of c: it contained the following: test.txt, test.rtf, test.hhh, test.exe. The system restore only removed the test.exe file. Based on that one test, files of unknown type are saved along with known types like word docs. I suspect .exe and .dll files in particular are not saved.