This is a bit of a long story and I see no reason to cut it down, so bear with me.....please.
Just over a week ago, my boys bought a new computer game, Lego Harry Potter. So I loaded it onto the computer and my wife and I got several minutes of peace and quiet. There was some background noise, but it was happy, small boy type noise, so we were not disturbed. Then it went very, very quiet and we heard some whispering. This followed a duel call of "Papa". I went up and was informed that the computer had turned off and would not restart. This was followed by a second duel response, "we did not do anything"...

Sure enough the computer was dead and was accompanied by a slight hot and dead electrical smell.
Not the biggest problem in the world, that was yet to come, so don't get bored and move on to the next thread just yet. We have all been their, computer dies, buy a new one, remove old hard drive from dead computer, plug into new computer, retrieve important data, format old drive, then store it, thrash it, or use it in the new computer. That last option was not on the table as I bought myself a nice new (gamer) laptop. It is a Toshiba Satellite 770 all singing all dancing. In fact last night I fell in love with FSX again. I was able to get 20 fps with ALL sliders on max

, but that is another story.
So nice new lappy and not so old lappy (that will go back to the office to replace the dead desktop). I removed that hard drives, bought an adapter cable plugged them in a had a look. First drive, mmmmm, don't need any of that, a quick format will do. Next drive, a few pictures and videos (I wonder where my wife's work files are stored), and onto the last drive, a few pictures and my wife's work files. I found pictures and a couple of exe files and serials for them I had stored and now my wife's files..........nothing, not a single byte, just the first hard drive sat looking at me in a formatted state and if it could, probably giggling like a school girl. Now it will not take a rocket scientist to see where this is going.
After soiling myself and telling my wife that the transfer was going fine, I panicked, soiled myself again. At this point I was deep in it. In fact I was so deep in it, if the North Atlantic was brown smelly stuff, I was down on Titanic standing on her poop deck, so and did what anyone in this situation should do........PM'd Ozzy....and then soiled myself yet again...
This is where the very public thank you now comes into play. He spent the last week PM-ing and emailing me with help, tips and links to sort out my very, very, very, marriage endangering problem. Though he did take great delight in telling me what a large pair of baby feeding devices commonly found hanging on the front of ladies I was and linking that to size of the nipples on said devices. Today, I managed to undelete and retrieve all missing files, thus saving my marriage and any chance that I would ever "get any" again (though after 20 years of marriage, you do the maths

)
Lessons learned,
1. Never, ever format a hard drive unless it has sat gathering dust for the last 20 years in the back of a cupborad and even the DON'T!!!
2. See above....
3. If you are ever in this sort of situation, call the man, in this case Ozzy,
4. See above
5. The most important lesson, you will owe him a lot of (very well deserved) beer.
Thank you again Mark

Matt