its840, I'm guessing you tried to use some sort of recovery program. My suggestion to you is to make frequent back ups of your computer. a 300gig (external) drive can be had for 150 and I'll get you Norton Ghost Let the image thing run over night and you have a complete back up of you system. If your kids crash it, the back up should be an almost direct replacement.

The Maxtor one touch back up software, lets you either use their program to "restore" your stuff or it basicly coppies ALL the files onto the backup hard drive so you can literally boot the computer off of it.

ya thats thats it. i have alot of my music backed up on a 40 gig, but not all and everything else was lost. thanks

I'm hoping that "got" means you paid for a legal version of it.

mmmm riiiiight

Ghost is a great utility. We used it exclusively at my old job. The only thing that you have to be careful is ghosting a system that already has an image saved on that hard drive. Sometimes it will cause the latest image and the original image to become corrupt.

I agree, I use it exclusively at work. I administer a 2003 server and unicast images to client workstations all over our network. The Dos boot disks work well but I use a program called Bart PE (www.nu2.nu) to create a bootable CD of Win XP for service and recovery of a damaged disk. If you own Ghost you can also create a "plug-in" to do the job. If anyone wants to "get your geek on" check it out...

I've used Ghost, I much prefer BootIT NG (www.terabyteunlimited.com). You can slide partitions, copy partitions, boot multiple operating systems, back up to CD, etc etc. You can have more than 4 partitions through the creation of an EMBR.

I always have a Windows XP backup partition which is an "installed and activated" version of WinXP. When WinXP goes south, I copy this out and start over!