Nowt

[boots and saddles]

Well I'm back after a week without a computer, Lost my hard drive & everything on it. including about 80 British formation patches and all my Canadian field service caps. Like the Englishman said I've got nowt left. Oh well so what,life is still good. Ray

[jim a]

That's to bad... I'm reading your post as a computer hard drive crash and you lost the pictures of the formation patches plus the pictures of your field service caps.... not your computer was stolen plus 80 patches stolen plus your field caps stolen... (now that would be a real disaster!)... no backup discs?... pictures not posted to photobucket where you could pull them back from there.... ?

[boots and saddles]

No, no backup disc's was continually adding & kept putting it off. Ray

[wright241]

Originally Posted by boots and saddles

No, no backup disc's was continually adding & kept putting it off. Ray

Ray,
I use 2G USB "sticks" - they are dirt cheap these days. david

[boots and saddles]

Dave what is a USB stick? you are talking to a Novice here. Ray

[wright241]

Originally Posted by boots and saddles

Dave what is a USB stick? you are talking to a Novice here. Ray

Ray,
USB = Universal Serial Bus - simplisticly, its just another way of connecting equipment to your PC.
On most PC's (assuming that your is not more than 10 years "old" and you are running Windows2000 or even Win98) there are a number of connectors - a round connector for your keyboard & mouse (green and purple as in the photo); one for your monitor, a number of other connectors (serial, printer etc) and if its less than 4 years old, probably a number of USB ports, a firewire(1394) and maybe an external SATA port - I have enclosed a picture of a PC board that has 2 USB port connections these are from an old PC board. Most PC's these days have at least 2 or 3 or even more. If you have this connector you should be able to connect a USB stick to it - see photos 2/3 - or any external USB "device" (a hard drive, a CD/DVD recorder/player etc - or even a QX5 microscope for those details required by other forum members when authenticating parts of a badge.
Note that the USB connector can ONLY be connected one way - it has a plastic key. For the non-techies out there note that the USB connector should NEVER been forced into the (1394) firewire connector. Check first.
My apologies for assuming that everyone knows this sort of stuff, I have been doing this for years and forget.
Universal Serial Bus

[Jibba Jabba]

I dont mean to make a joke of it but can you be a bit more specific when you say lost. You lose a pen not a hard disk drive.

Is it a physical problem with the disk or is the data on the disk merely corrupt? Can the disk boot?

There are disk recovery tools out there and companies that can recover data from damaged HD's.

I dont use solid state memory for the simple reason the data cannot be recovered if the device suffers a total failure. Imagine your hard disk drives as vinyl records, the data is still there.

If you still have the old disk and the IT technician who swapped your disk didnt rip you off and keep the old disk, I may be able to recover the data for you for free.

[wright241]

Originally Posted by Jibba Jabba

I dont mean to make a joke of it but can you be a bit more specific when you say lost. You lose a pen not a hard disk drive.

Is it a physical problem with the disk or is the data on the disk merely corrupt? Can the disk boot?

There are disk recovery tools out there and companies that can recover data from damaged HD's.

I dont use solid state memory for the simple reason the data cannot be recovered.

jibbajabba,
You are absolutely correct in that (for now...) you cannot "recover" a PC & its operating system from a USB stick or a USB hard drive.
USB sticks are for backing up and saving files, and I regularly backup all my "My Documents", the registry and ALL data files to various USB devices.

Without labouring the point, surely, what was being described (in the thread to start with) was the loss of important files, PC & Hard drive data recovery is something else entirely.

You are also correct in that there are many companies that can do this for you. There is also a very nice piece of software that I have used in anger - at work no less - to recover data from "lost" hard drives. Its called WINHEX - I should point out that I have no commercial connections with this company, but I am very pleased with what it can do - and have been using it for around 5 years. Various police forces use it to "extract" data from hard drives that their owners thought were re-formatted.

[Pylon1357]

Ray sorry to hear of your computer troubles. BUT as stated before. The information is still on your hard drive and not lost.

My buddy, and the site maintenace fellow for my website, was able to recover every image and document on my laptop drive when it crashed. We are talking over 10,000 images and photos of mostly Second World War era. Along with all my badges, and militaria collection all catigorized and notes. In total 60gigs of information and images.

With the new hard drive installed he loned me a USB adapter that plugs into the hard drive, I copied everthing over. Worked great.

[Unknownsoldier]

PC world have memory sticks for sale at the moment: 2gigs 5 quid.... or a 1TB (around 1000 gigs, or closer 1 million bytes) HD for 130.... I just bought one of them as my comp is slowly failing, still getting my HD replaced with hopefully a new 300 gig one by a friend.

Tom

[Jibba Jabba]

These days I only use two PC's. The one I'm on now is a shabby cheap system that I use for surfing the net, my best system is for high powered applications and only gets switched on when I need that extra power.

My military research is stored on a hard drive fitted into what you call in the US and Canada a 'caddy'. When you arent using this spare disk you can remove it via a handle on the front. You can also buy external portable hard drives very cheap these days, if you dont want to open your case to fit a caddy.

It is possible to recover deleted data from solid state memory assuming that the memory has not been over written.

[boots and saddles]

Thanks Guys for that Info. Jibba Jabba I had no back-up disc everything was on the hard drive & the fellow said he couldn't recover it, but he did say that some places could recover it for me, but it would be costly. Ray