My hard drive just died a few days ago. I don't care about anything except the photos of my son.

Every morning, I had Windows XP setup to do a backup of all of My Documents to a 2nd Hard Drive at 5am. A few days ago, I went to check my email before heading off to work and the machine was super sluggish. I noticed that Office XP was asking me to reboot as if I had just finished installing it and AVG Anti-Virus was asking for a reboot too (but every day at 6am, AVG does an update and sometimes needs Outlook to close first).

So, I did the reboot and suddenly, Windows is unable to start because some file ns_1252.dll or someting isn't found. I did all of the nornal stuff booting off of the WinXP disk into Repair mode to try to manually copy the file over. Nothing worked.

I ordered two new drives (to run RAID 1 now) and the just arrived today. Finally able to install XP on some new disks and plug the old drives in as normal drives, I've been installing Windows for the last few hours. To my abolute f'ing horor, even my backup is hosed because it is only 2kb and not the multi GB it should be.

I can browse the old C drive, but only some folders. What I want is the My Documents > My Pictures folder. It has 4000+ images including ALL of the images of my 15month old son!! I'm freaking out. I thought I had done enough to have a DAILY backup for my entire My Documents folder but I'M F'D.

I know there is probably nothing that can be done, but I'm posting here just in case the smart folkks at empegbbs.com can help.

Brad

PS - Dont buy Maxtor. This drive was less than 2 years old. Every other drive in my system is over 4.