Petra wrote:well I don't give up hope that one day I can find what I lost on my Vincent Price Collection. I still miss a lot. Also have bought a few things but it's the same like with the traders. Most of them still don't react at all
To state the obvious, a portable drive is a drive that you can carry; and anything you can carry, you can drop.
I feared this so much that I set up a home file server (on a RAID1 = hard disk failure protected) because I couldn't keep burning DVDRs (which eventually expire too). But if my house burns down, I still loose everything.
Sometimes a hard disc is not totally gone, but more like a book that looses its binding; the pages are still there, if you rearrange them again. Maybe your friend is lucky and can recover the contents?
By now I've become curious so I hope you manage to find it. There must still be some VP stuff left to trade; how about BBC interviews (Frost/Parkinson)?