Laptop broke after 2 weeks now they want me to pay!

[Nicole91]

Hi hoping I can get some advice

 

Bought a Sony vaio laptop from currys and

 

within 2 weeks the hard drive has failed and will now not boot.

 

I intend to send it back to currys and get a new one but this is where my problem lies.

 

When buying they gave me recovery media of 16gb and my oc required minimum 17gb to back up the system,

 

I would have gone to the store to fix this but haven't had the time in the past week or so.

 

When I rang currys to ask how long it needed to be sent away for to get the data off the old laptop and onto a new one

they said about 2 weeks and there would be a charge of £80 to transfer my data!

 

I have a lot in there from my previous laptop which I now won't be able to get back without paying

but it was their fault for supplying me the wrong size recovery media!!

 

Not to mention if a fault occurs within 2 weeks under the SOGA they should bear the costs.

 

Has anyone had this problem before? Do you think it's worth arguing this point in store that I wasn't able to back up the system because of their mistake?

[jfhall82]

What do you mean by your OC??

If the hard drive has actually failed, rather than just the operating system is failing to boot I very much doubt Currys has the expertise to recover data from a failed disk. Experts in the data recovery field would charge significantly more than £80 to do so!

 

If the hard drive is in fact fine and it's an operating system problem then recovering the data is a trivial task of connecting the hard drive to anther machine, I suspect a half decent independent computer shop would charge £10-20 for this.

 

I wouldn't expect any of the store based muppets to be able to distinguish between an actual hardware failure and an OS booting problem so don't rely on their diagnosis!

 

Why are Curry's obliged to supply you with recovery media at all?

How could Currys have reasonably known how much data you wanted to transfer, only you know that... so only you can determine what the correct size of backup should be.

 

If you still have your old laptop why not recover the data from there?

 

In my opinion you need to take some responsibility for ensuring your user data is backed up. From the language you used it sounds like Currys suggested recovery media for the purposes of restoring the system files and not your user data.

 

SOGA might cover you for the hardware repair bill but you might have a tougher time using it to justify consequential losses for data that you failed to backup. It sounds like they are already progressing the actual repair of the hardware and the fee is to cover the cost of migrating your data from the faulty system to a new one - arguably something you should have backed up.

[Nicole91]

I meant pc sorry, it autocorrected my spelling. I know I should have backed up and yes that's my fault. I was in the process of sorting this out, as you can imagine that's bad luck when it's failed on me within weeks. I'm not that I.t literate but the system said the c drive was damaged it did some scans and now when it powers on I get the sony vaio logo then a black screen. My partner tried it in safe mode with sonys own way of recovering the data, that failed twice. Guess I might have to pay the £80. I just think that's such a rip off when I bought a laptop which was clearly faulty in the first place. It hasn't been dropped and is pretty much brand new.

 

On a separate point when I got the laptop currys gave me the back up media for the system with the laptop, it came with it so i assumed it would be the right size. When I was setting up the pc and it prompted me to back up the system, what they had supplied wasn't big enough. As I understand it if I was able to back up the system it would gave allowed access to the data?

[jfhall82]

ok,

Well there are two issues.

1. The repair of the hardware

2. The recovery of your user data

 

It's not obvious to me (being an IT person) from your description if it is a physical fault of the hard drive or a fault with the operating system/boot process. Were there any noises, squeaks or repeated clicking sounds audible? If so that suggests a physical fault with the hard drive. Whilst it may well be technically possible to recover data from a failed disk, it requires expertise and skills far beyond that of the Curry's engineers and it typically a task taken on by data recovery experts likely to charge several hundreds of pounds.

 

If, however it is a fault with the operating system or something is going wrong in the boot process there is a strong likelihood that the file system is fine (your data still exists). In this case it would be very easy for someone with a bit of know how to recover the data by connecting the disk to a working computer. Even Curry's could manage this. It's not a service worth £80 though.

 

If it turns out the the hard drive has actually failed it's unlikely you will get your data back whether you pay the £80 or not. I would expect the fault to be remedied simply by replacing it with a new hard drive.

 

I'm not sure who you are dealing with at Curry's but you can safely assume that the majority of their staff don't know what they are talking about when it comes to a technical diagnosis, they are sales people not engineers. What they tell you may not necessarily be accurate.

 

If they try and fob you off because you haven't done the recovery stuff it's irrelevant and doesn't change the fact they need to remedy the fault. You are not required to do so and your statuary rights are in no way affected just because you didn't do the recovery.

 

I can only presume the £80 is to cover the cost of recovering your data (which won't be possible if the disk has failed). The £80 should NOT be for replacing the failed component and that's what you need to be quite clear on.

 

Not entirely the answer you were after I'm sure, as the situation with your user data remains unclear. But certainly Curry's are responsible for repairing the hardware fault and restoring it to factory condition. It'll be harder to pin recovery of your data on them though....

[jfhall82]

When you say they gave you backup media what do you mean? Did you pay for it, was it a freebee? What was it, DVD's/Hard drive? If you attempted to run the backup after you put your user data on then of course, it may not have been large enough depending on how much data you had introduced.

 

If however the backup media was intended to just backup the system in it's 'out of the box' state with no user data then really the backup media [whatever it was] should have been sufficient for the task. This may be a point you can raise with Curry's.

 

However, if it is the case that it was only intended to backup the system in it's 'out of the box' capacity then you would still be in the same situation as you are now as you made no provision to backup your user data. Furthermore Curry's would have been unable to supply backup media of the appropriate specification unless you told them how much data you wanted to backup.

 

Can you see why this isn't entirely their fault?

 

Do you still have the old laptop?? Can you not recover some data from there?

 

General point of advice is to ALWAYS have your data in two places.

[raydetinu]

Always back up onto an external hard drive, in my limited knowledge, I believe that is the way to go, which I do every few months.

If it is a hard drive fault then insist on a new computer, not a repair as it is quite new ( reject it under soga, not fit for purpose ).

[porkyp1g]

Who has confirmed that the hard drive has failed? Who has run a test on the hard drive to check? As another says, is there any physical clunking noises coming from the laptop? Even if the hard drive has failed and you end up with a repair or replacement, then user data is not covered under soga and is your responsibility.

 

I'm gonna guess and say your old backup from the old laptop isn't available or you would be using that. Your first course of action is to actually get it checked out and confirm if the hard drive is faulty or not first.

[flexeh]

cant you borrow an external harddrive with an operating system already installed, then go into the bios and boot from usb get the laptop on and recover onto the external you borrowed?

[Nicole91]

Thanks for all the replies. It's now sorted! I had thought it might be the hard drive because at the time the computer crashed it was running hard drive checks because that was the error window then it went black and wouldn't turn on. I rang sony and seems they've had the problem before. A new windows 8 update corrupted my c drive. Meanwhile I managed to recover data from my old hard drive on my old laptop, Safe to say, that's now backed up-twice.

 

Also the recovery media was a freebie with the laptop yeah in the form of a USB stick. On the receipt turns out they were actually supposed to give me 32gb for backing up the system only but the woman in store had given me 16gb which wasn't enough to back up the system. I've now gone back to currys and got them to give me the 32gb USB stick to create recovery media which I'm going to do nuw.

 

Apart from that Sony restored the laptop to factory settings via instructions on the phone and asked me to download a file on their website so the windows update doesn't cause this problem again!

 

I've learnt the hard way to always back up

[locutus]

Windows 8 needs 8 GB for backing up... I don't know where you get over 16gb... guessing that's some personal files and folders?

 

My trick for backing up photos is to burn the relevant ones to a CD / DVD for friends and relatives, and include the disk with any gifts... if my HDD fails I can get my photos back.

 

Also Facebook etc. can all store photos online.

 

Dropbox also gives some free online storage.

 

REMEMBER:

Unless it is backed up in 3 separate locations, it is not backed up!

[MaxxPower]

The 16GB is likely coming from bloatware stuck on there by the manufacturer.

The charge was, as has been said, likely for backing up your data. From the sounds of it this was perfectly doable by just attaching it to a caddy as there doesn't sound like there was a physical issue with the drive. Part of the charge was probably also for carrying out the actual system restore for you, as the store doing this for you wouldn't be covered under the warranty or SOGA since it's something that the instruction manual will explain how to do yourself.