Mr Seto is certainly correct but I'd like to add a little. 99% of the time it's not the drive but the OS that's gone wonkey. All data, as opposed to the operating system and associated programs needs to be on a separate partition. XP mavens say it's no longer necessary. As you discovered, they're full of it. I keep duplicate image and sound files on two different drives and back up my home folder to the larger. The machine would have to explode before I lost everything.