Heard about a mine surveyor in the Northern Territory (Oz), who left his laptop on the dash of his Landcruiser in 46c heat (10-15 degrees hotter in the FWD) while he had lunch. When he returned the laptop was so buckled and distorted he couldn't open it, so took it to a work mate who managed to prise it open....only to find all the keys had melded and were inoperable....

Next they proceeded to remove the HD to place it in another machine so as to access and transfer the data contained therein. Big mistake was the other laptop had facility for only one HD, thus they removed the OS & MBR, etc...then wondered why it wouldn't boot up.

Problem was eventually resolved by surveyor's 11 yo son, who somehow connected the HD to an external drive connected to his PC, then transferred the data via his PC to his dad's brand spanking new laptop...which one would imagine'll never, ever get left in a hot FWD again.

P.S. hi Starkers!

Howdy Skinhit, 'tis nice ta see ya.

A personal data loss saga...well sort of.

Was running out of room on a 40gig storage drive so replaced it with a 160gig...and I was very careful to move all the data to its respective partition on the new drive...or so I thought. After hitting 'Move this folder' to shift my collection of wallpapers, it suddenly disappeared into cyberspace....another planet/universe. Despite a thorough, desperate and frantic search of all drives/recyclers it was never to be seen again....not until almost two years later.

When building my wife's puter I put in my old 40gig to give her some additional storage space....so I partitioned her 160gig, loaded Windows XP, fired her up and began to allocate, file/folder locations....when lo` and behold, there was my missing walls folder, hiding on my old D drive "How the **** did it get in there?" I thought to myself....being the 'Move this folder function can not send to the same location and had been set to the new E drive...

Oh well, all's well that ends well.....(oh, and Skinhit, could this one of those 'paperbag/incognito' threads that could go downhill real fast)....I even recovered some of my old walls with scantily clad babes.

I even recovered some of my old walls with scantily clad babes.

i just hope you got them off the misses drive before she saw them

I remember when my brand new 850 MB HD (which were huge then!) that died only few months later.

What pissed me off is that it disappeared and company (WD) refused to send me new one. It's still in void somewhere. I still wonder what happened to it.