Damned thing crashed after my kid allowed an application past ZoneAlrm which attached itself to a vital startup file and I had to reformat and reinstall my OS.  Just now getting back in form, without my 1500 songs, favorites files, all the other crp I lost!

Gateway was of limited help for their CS, not that I haven't dealt with thier stupid tecks before.

Put 2 hard disks in the machine.  Stage Windows on C: and put your data on D:.  That way if you have to zap C:, it's not a big deal.

Better yet, put in a RAID card and install a C: drive for boot and use a 2 drive mirror as D: for your data.  Boot drive dies, no biggie.  One of the mirror drives dies, slap in a new one and keep on trucking.

I've got a 120GB RAID array in my primary server and another 80GB RAID array in another machine that has all our MP3's and CD rips on (37GB/12,700 files).

Yeah, it's always a real bummer to lose a couple gigs worth of porn, especially if you're on dial up

What's worse my preferences and configurations are all fucked up.  I'm still runnin Win98 on a year old machine.  Gateway fucked that up too.  Would only replace "as like" under warranty.  

Things are still strange and cannot figure why my CD burner is out of commision.  have to figure the other minor stuff later.  I am bag online, email works, and am regathering my music files.  That will take a weeek or so I estimate.

Get yourself Win XP Pro and ditch Win98!!!!  On hard drives especially the bigger storage models today is to break the drive into multiple partitions.  Always keep your important files off the C: partition as if you have to clean the Operating System off the C: partition you will still have your important files on say D: partition.  It doesn't hurt to buy another hard drive and use it as backup, most people cannot afford to have data retrieved from a dead hard drive!

One word.

Acronis

What would I need to do to used another HD to use as a dat storage/backup?  Is it difficult?

Lol...you guys and your gateways.....

[url=http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=216850]Hmm...[/url]

No.

go buy another HD, open the case and plug it into the cables that are plugged into the  cdrom.  Boot windows and partition it.

If you open the case and there is an empty HD bay you can set the new drive as slave and put it on the same ide cable as your current hd.

Then use Acronis, Norton Ghost, or whatever (there are a free programs) and it will make a mirror copy's of the HD.

Acronis also make's images and you can pick the size of the image.  Either 1 big one or broken down into chunks that could be written to cd's or dvd-r's.

I create images with acronis and burn them off to a DVD-RW.  If I where to have a need to restore all i have to do is put the boot disk acronis makes in & boot up then tell it to restore the image to the drive.
A restore takes about 20 minutes.

I'm having my own adventure tonight. All of a sudden I'm getting disk errors copying files under Win98 and Win2000 (drive is partitioned). What a nightmare! So, I opened the case, got all the dust out, and reseated the SCSI card a couple of times just in case it got knocked loose in the PCI slot. Now I have it back together and I'm copying files, and so far, no errors. I hope to God that's all it was because the last thing I want to have to do is put in a new drive and restore all my files (thousands).

I wish I could go back to my days of being computer ignorant!

BAckup to removable media....ALways...

Key word...kids.
I keep a backup computer hooked up and ready, just in case I can't figure out how to undo what they did.
So far, it's gathering dust. [:)]

Concur with the removable media for critical files.  CD-R/CD-RW is dirt cheap and DVD burners are finally down to good prices and kick ass speeds.

XP Pro has been the most stable M$ OS that I've used (and I started with DOS 2.x).  98 is good right after install (assuming you get good drivers for everything) but will tend to unravel within 6-12 months and need to be re-done.  One bad driver update can turn it into a house of cards.