[Jamo]

As mentioned above, a good geek ought to be able to retrieve the stuff (albeit possibly one file at a time), and as Tom notes, there are programs out there to help. Don't give up.

One of my attorneys just had his go down in his older laptop, but a local geek is retrieving through DOS. Luckily, we copy from our laptops to our main secretarial files for all documents, but his work in progress was almost lost. Good news is that I just got him a new Sony.

We've tried all kinds of backups. The best and easiest way we've found, especially for laptops is simply getting one of those 1G external memory stick thingies that plugs into your USB port. Quick, easy and much more compact than a CD. I keep alot of my pics in RAW format, which takes up huge amounts of space, so I have a seperate storage thingy for them.

Like Ernie, I have a C and a D drive in my Sony laptop, so I keep all the pics, videos, etc. in the D drive so they don't jam up any operating systems and text files in the C drive.

Too bad, Ed...it's a pain the a$$ when that happens.