I agree with PJF - the chances of everything actually being gone are small indeed. A disk that won't boot is one thing, a dead/trashed disk is something else. So your data is (was) there, but you can't (couldn't) get at it. I've had similar things happen many times over the last 15 years of computer fun&games, but never yet actually lost an sigificant number of important files. ('Touch wood' I say to myself and tap my head) One good fix is to get a second harddisk, connect it as temporary master and the bad disk as slave, boot from the healthy disk and access the data on the other, backing it up. Then you can diagnose the bad disk, reinstall Windows without touching the data, etc. There are 50 different other ways to solve probs like these, but the ONE THING YOU MUST NEVER DO is reformat the disk. NEVER! Then you have lost it all, guaranteed! Well, even that can be solved, one can retrieve data from deleted files and formatted disks with the right S/W tools, but it's no fun. Incidentally, I never let the 'wait' thing go on when installing a DAZ file - I cancel it immediately and direct to the Poser directory manually. I have 4 disks with 15 partitions, 260 GigaBytes of data in all, so it takes the install prog up to five minutes (!) to bring back a suggestion for install directory. And that's five minutes too long. My Stephanie install was uneventful, fortunately. :] FishNose