But I *CAN'T* Lose Those!

[Shabo]

you ain't never finding my illegal stuffs

Of course, that's assuming you have illegal stuffs...

*Don't forget to plead the 5th!!*

[DannyboyO1]

Actually, you can't, because ash is pure carbon. You can't even tell what the ash came from

There's no difference between the ash created by a hard drive, and that created by a piece of paper... or a human body. It's just carbon

Except that carbon isn't magnetic. There is actually a great deal of difference between carbon ash and, say, iron. (Sulphuric ash is one that comes to mind that is obviously not carbon, but you don't get a lot of that without hanging around a volcano.)

Also, I'm pretty certain a good forensic expert with time and a full lab can show off the difference in burnt paper and flesh. If nothing else, you'd expect calcium in one of the samples.

But I'm just being really pedantic. I think heating a magnet sufficiently will de-magnetize it anyway.

[HYHYBT]

with as cheap as internal hard drives are now, there's really no excuse to not buy two and mirror them.

*No* excuse for not having two internal hard drives? How about "but it's a laptop!"

(I *do* plug in an external drive once a day for backup, though.... at least when I'm home. )

[sms001]

Apparently some people think I'm holding out on them when I tell them their hard drive is cooked and that they'll be lucky to get

Oh boy. I'm not a big thread starter, so I've been waiting for this kind of thing to come along!

Clowninasack: The flip side to this is how stunned some clients are when you CAN recover stuff. I did a notebook HD replacement a couple of years ago. Machine was unbootable and after some diags I explained carefully to client that the drive was dead. He looked anguished but resigned. New HD was a week down the line so I threw the old one on an adapter and set PC Inspector on it. Guy looked like a five year old with a bike under the Christmas tree when he got back the laptop with two folders labeled "Pictures" and "Documents" on the desktop

I totally agree that hard drive prices remove any reason to not raid-1 at least although I mirror (disk clone actually) the boot drive of my workhorse machine once a week instead. All created work (My Documents, Office folders, etc.) get batch file copied to a third drive daily. Sadly, I learned an important backup lesson fairly recently - don't forget the desktop! I try to get stuff (incoming pictures, urls, works-in-progress) into folders on a regular basis but hey, that IS what the desktop is for, right? Didn't lose much, but boy did I feel stupid. The upside is that crash took about thirty minutes to recover from. Turned off the PC, selected the clone drive as the boot in BIOS, dragged folders from the daily backup drive, ordered new hd online.

And now for you and the other techies edification and amusement, identify this problem:

[lordlundar]

And now for you and the other techies edification and amusement, identify this problem:

Someone playing with the language settings?

[Ironclad Alibi]

And now for you and the other techies edification and amusement, identify this problem:

[ATTACH]584[/ATTACH]

Corrupted disk directory?

[Cyphr]

time for some TV drama: Someone inverted your ascii byte unicode resulting in a corruption of your CMOS GUI!