It is possible to have the surface scanned by data recovery experts but it costs upwards of a 1000 pounds, what size of external disk was it Peter?
Have a look at these, Peter. discs: http://www.mdisc.com/ write-up: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2933...ewed-your-data-good-for-a-thousand-years.html burners: 1) http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/compu...-ultraslim-dvd-writer-black-10137032-pdt.html 2) http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00MY75X...m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=04MB7AYS8PR4CP16ZG6J I will be getting some m-disks in the next couple of weeks and will let you know how the data burning went.
Jim, I am going to have to be ruthless with the Canon raw files and delete lots! Still, there were so many duplications.
It was quite an old Toshiba drive in a largish aluminium case. Can't remember the storage size but it was in 2008 when it gave up the ghost. I would have paid a thousand at the time but nobody was interested to try. All in the past now as I dumped it when I relocated here.
Update: Bought a Samsung Blu-ray (M-disc compatable) burner/player yesterday for about £60. Connected it today and noticed that the included Cyberlink software was years old and will not work with Windows 10 which I will probably move to soon. Will return the burner and get a refund. The search continues...... Went to two Curry's/PCWorld stores and the salesmen hadn't heard of M-disc in both.
M-disk, will that last? Many years ago I purchased a Zip drive for backup purposes, it seemed the ideal solution at the time. However the Zip drive lost favour among users as they tended to develop the "Click of Death", as did mine. I binned it a few years ago and am left with a pile of useless backup Zip-disks.
That was my point, the medium might last a thousand years but the ability to read it won't even current standard DVD specs and protcols could vanish.
Software bundled with burners is quite often a (near) end-of-life version and the software manufacturer hopes that you'll swell his coffers by paying for an update. Sixty Quid for a Blu-Ray burner seems like a bargain to me so I'd keep the drive and simply download ImgBurn which is (IMO) the very best of its type; don't be put-off by the fact that it's freeware.
You only have about 3 months left to make the leap to 10 for free Mike, end of June or July I think. Since a couple of versions back Windows has been able to burn disc's on it's own, you just insert the disc and copy the files.
I want to make sure that I see in the m-disc burner specs that it will be able to burn the 100GB m-discs too. I think it is worth waiting a little bit to get the burner/software that will burn these bigger discs in Windows 10.
I don't quite understand mate? Do you mean you want to be able to dual boot with say Windows 7 and Windows 10?
Microsoft no longer want to support the older platforms, they are driving hard to completely kill all the older versions of Windows, make no mistake support for lots of stuff is going to stop although they have to stick to their published support cycle for older versions of Windows. XP is already completely dead, although millions still use it at their own risk, support for earlier versions of IE is being rapidly phased out. The upgrade replaces your current Windows installation it backs up the old installation into a folder named Windows.old which is automatically deleted after a month if you don't revert to your old version of the OS. For that reason you need to have a reasonable amount of free space on your hard drive before you let it upgrade your PC. I have upgraded over 6 machines now without any problems, the new OS is stable and fast, I am not completely convinced by the current implementation of the new start menu but it is way better than Windows 8 and 8.1. There will never be a Windows 11 (that is what they have said) really from now on it will just be Windows and constantly upgraded on a rolling basis by Microsoft. The upgrade is free for a few more months and I would urge anyone with valid Windows 7 or later licences to take the free upgrade for all its faults it is still the best Windows ever.
I'm not keen on the classic shell, our guys tend to install that on most Server 2012 installations, the shell is one of the most fragile parts of Windows and the vast majority of complaints that people have about Windows tend to be due to lockups in the shell either simple native lockups or because one program or another has hooked into the shell and has tried something dodgy. The Classic Shell works well but the new explorer shell is visually very appealing all it really lacks is the speed of access you get from CTRL+ESC and the up and down arrows for navigating to your most frequently used programs, this is my work menu on Windows 7 and my setup on my own laptops in Windows 10 You can still navigate using the arrow keys but it is less effective than it was previously, but I will persevere with the new explorer shell.
