Jeeze, am I one lucky fella. Been meaning to back up the important files on my pooter and been too lazy to get around to it. Well, you guessed it, Sunday night, my computer would not boot. Fiddled with it for hours and just no go.

Went down Tuesday and bought a $60 hard drive, plugged it in, crossed my fingers and SHAZAM the computer booted. I attached the old hard drive as a slave and broke out in a cold sweat when I tried to access it. Lo and behold, I could read the old drive and retrieve all the data-whew!

I'm still not sure if I picked up a boot virus or had a hard drive crash. The drive would cycle through all the post screens and try to load, but then fail. The two previous crashes I have ever seen have been very obvious, the fuzzy screen of death and no worky.

All in all an ok ending to the story .