Huge Dilemma.. Any advice would be greatly appreciated

[zetaborealis]

Until recently I was using an acer aspire 5740G (2.27Ghz Intel Core i5-430M (dual core), 4GBRAM).
I had been using it mainly for producing music on Ableton live 8, and had been using it quite extensively for a 1.5 years when the other day it failed to start up and I got the blue screen of death. I did some tests myself and inevitably took it into get it repaired and long story short, to get it working again with the harddrive exactly as how it would be extremely hard/expensive to do.

The thing is if I take out the harddisc and connect it to a Mac or a Linux system, I can access the files, so most of the data is not lost, and I had been periodically backing up parts of my data.

Now my first and most important question is, will I be able to access all my complex unfinished ableton projects again?
Say if I buy a new laptop and copy all my ableton/sample/project/plugins etc data to the new laptop from my old harddisc, what will happen?
Will I have to install everything in the exact same locations again, if it's even possible to get the exact same location. (The thought of installing hundreds of plugins again is horrifying, but if I reinstall the plugins and open up an old project, will the settings be as saved?).
As I don't have an image of my harddisc backed up, I feel it's going to be difficult to get every file in the exact same place..
Does everything mess up if one bit of data is missing, or in the wrong place??


Now I'd been considering upgrading my laptop to the newest macbook pro anyway as my Acer wasn't able to handle a lot of my projects when I had all the heavy cpu consuming plugins and such.. but not until the end of the year, and not until I'd finished all my projects etc.
I know macs can run windows, so does that mean if I get a MBP, and copy all my data from my old pc harddisc, I'll be able to run the pc ableton live with the pc versions of the vst's I have, and open the projects I created on my windows laptop?


Sorry for the barrage of questions, if any of you could provide me with any advice or info it would be greatly appreciated!

[stonee]

as long as your files are organized, and you didn't lose any of your samples, at worst you may have to take a few minutes to let ableton relink missing files.

abletons file structure is pretty wicked for moving around as far as media editing programs are concerned, especially if you manage to keep all of your stuff in your ableton library.

[zetaborealis]

Hmm I hope it is as you say, I guess I'm also worried about all the plugins..