I have been having pc problems for a couple of weeks now. I ran several tests and it showed that I had over a thousand registry errors. Then I lost the harddrive search function. Then I lost system restore. This is on XP, by the way. I tried to run my XP disc and repair it, but it lost everything. about 6 years worth of work. I have never been so depressed about anything that wasnt' family or health related. I was below down. Everyone I talked to told me that it was gone for good, no way to get it back. As a last resort I called up a local guy who works on computers. Other technicians told me it was hopeless, but not this guy. He said for $45 he would attempt to save all my info, and he felt he could because he has done this sort of thing many times. I had nothing to lose, so I sent it to him. He took the hard drive out, put it into one of his units, and he got everything back!
For another $45, he added a 40 gig hard drive and ghosted my other one to it. I am amazed. He said he had some "special" software, but wouldn't talk about it. I still dont' have all the bugs out, but it is back up and I have all my data, as far as I can tell anyway. I have been burning cd's like crazy. He burned me a dvd with all the stuff I asked for, in case it crashed again. The moral of the story is, back up your data, even if you have a stable system. THings can and do go wrong.
Crazy