Me too, happily you will find that personal data will be saved in Unique extensions. So a Text Doument is stuff.txt. Midi used be stuff.mid.

I hope you get all the files that were chewed up. This problem can never occur again if you take these easy steps to protect your work.

Get a seperate 'Data' Hard Drive, does not have to be fast or big, anything over one Gig is fine unless you are into MP3 and/or on line Video - in that case 80 Gigs would be about right. The Data Drive is usualy connected to the Primary Hard Drive Controller as a Slave When new out of the Box they are set to master so it pays to check this out! . Later the CD R if you get one will be a Mater on the next or Second Controller.

Next move all of your Data to the Data Drive and when done make shortcuts on the desktop to the most used.

Now some more investments to defeat the ever hungry file monster lol. Buy a HP or equivalent CD R drive, these days they are about 100 pounds sterling. The nice thing is that the CD disks are as little as 50 pence each.

HP for example is idiot easy to install so that would not be a problem for you. After it is in and working make a DATA CD of the DATA drive and store that away.

Every Month make a new backup DATA CD.

Now it does not matter if the computer is smashed to pieces by a bomb your data is safe and can easily be retrieved from any Ms Windows Machine with a CD ROM drive.

Some technical consderations for the curious. Since a Hard Drive has an index in the Boot sector which points to critical data, the contents of any drive are very easily damaged when this part of the Drive is damaged or corrupted. When one installs a Second NEW data drive it has it's own Boot Sector and since it gets used 20 percent less than the C or OperatingSystem Drive it is far less likely to fail.

A handy thing to know about drives is the Boot Records are easily refreshed by doing a SYS command with the drive name as the target. Course this only applies to MS DOS or MS Windows machines. If you have Unix then RTFM.

Another little gem is the undocumented use of FDISK in MS DOS - Windows machines, when one has a bad case of the Hacker Blues. Reboot the Machine with the WinderzRescue floppy in the A Drive. The machine will boot off the Floppy and give you a blank black screen with the blinking prompt top left.

Typing this loads into Memory a program to delete and replace the BOOT record of the BOOT drive, ie the one where the Operating System lives - usualy Drive C:

At the prompt type

fdisk/mbr

Then press the Enter key.

There is no report of anything being done but the screen will advance one Carriage Return. ie one line. The code is in Memory but not yet written to disk!!!

VERY IMPORTANT!

You save these changes to the Boot Sectors by TURNING OFF THEN TUNING ON THE COMPUTER! Please do allow at least 30 seconds after power down to let it properly stop and all drives to come to rest. - Parking the Hard Drive lol.

On reboot if you have Virus Protection enabled in BIOS you will see the Prompt - 'Warning the Boot Sector has been modified! Do you want to Continue?' In that case you would say yes. If you said No the Old Boot Record would be restored. (One of the few things MS got right BTW!)

If you do not have Virus Protection enabled you will not notice anything except your Hard Drive begins to run great just like when you first installed it.

:)