Just don't use that drive too much before you get a chance to try the freeware tool. It's the actual read/writes that destroy the data. Formatting doesn't, if you aren't being thorough.
I want a new computer, too. The laptop I'm using now is seven or eight years old now.
cheers odeon... I seem to be able to recover about a quarter of my lost music, and it found loads more than Recover My Files did. I'm keeping this one for next time I fuck up.
Heh, I ended up doing a bit of cobbling, its a 'small form factor' PC and everything inside is the bare minimum for space - including connections to IDE and power cables. I had to cut the plug for the floppy drive off and join the wires to a spare drive plug I cut off my old computer and tape the fuckers up lol, and recycle the primary IDE cable since the one on it was crap and only had one connection also. Still, it now has a second hard drive and my DVD writer installed - with any luck the DDR RAM I have knocking around will work too.
This is great news, Dunc. Hopefully most of the hard to come by music is in that quarter. I have got a lot of songs on one disc and if I lost it I would be fucked. I have it duped, but It's a three hundred GB hard drive that I have backed up on six other smaller disks, that I already had when I got the big one. I sometimes have to remind myself that I really COULD live without forty three thousand songs, just as a reality check, but I listen to more genres than average people, plus I'm a lot older and my tastes have evolved and grown, too. If we cut off our legs and counted, there would be a lot more rings on my leg. That's why I need so much music ... to keep the rings wet.
Your cobble work is a newer, better box you bought or re-hashing one you already had?
Attacking, I mean upgrading, a newer, better but rather tiny box I bought off ebay on Monday.
The good news is the RAM I've just added works just fine, so I now have 768MB DDR RAM on this PC, yay... no big deal to some, but I've been making do with a wheezy old Celeron 900 box with 256 MB SDRAM for years. In comparison, this is a flying machine.