I have three external hard drives connected to my PC. One is called 'Local Disk E'. It used to be a WD My Book. It contains approximately 480 Giga Bites of downloaded videos, most of which (say, 475 GB) haven't been burnt to DVD or otherwise backed up.
Last night I was moving files between Hard Drives. When I click on 'Local Disk E' I am presented with a message saying 'The Disk in Drive E is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?'
To which I answer 'No'.
I am assuming that the Disc Drive is dead, deceased, no more, a late disc drive. And the 480 GB are irretrievable. I am using Windows XP.
Has anybody got any bright ideas?
I do recall very many years ago, back in the days of Stand-Alone non-networked computers, and 5¼ a then a colleague, whom we shall Codename 'Malcolm' went along to his audit client, a well know Police Force in the London area (which at the time was a National Government function) to download accounting data from the accounts' department's PC. He inserted his floppy and went through the menu options that would permit him to format it until he got to 'Which drive would you like to format?' and he selected 'C'. The machine grunted into life,began clicking and whirling and chugging for an inordinate amount of time, at which point he realised what he had done, and, so rumour has it, fled. At the time we all thought this was one of those nightmare scenarios that all of us knew could happen so easily, but,preferably not to oneself. Actually, I would hope that there would have been regular back-up of the accounting data, so that the biggest consequence was the irritation of a bit of wasted time.
I however, don't have back-up.
It was all down-loaded from the internet; assuming that the links are all live, I am restricted to downloading 20 GB a week. So to replace it, assuming it's replaceable, could take nearly six months...
