thank you all ... I'll read through all of this later - have to go to work now ... OK - so much for the bad news ... now for the good ... I think I can backup almost 95% - in the first panic I forgot about to repair a HD ... W2K did a good job (I think) by running this and that maintenance routine (it arranged - rearranged files etc the whole night - as I can see from the file-system I lost around 500 MByte 'cause of damaged sectors (well a headcrash even) - but it seems that's mainly in the Windows-System folder (good to know 'cause THAT's replaceable ...) - it seems I can save a lot - but first I have to buy another HD (you can believe me I'll touch the damaged one only again only for copying over to another HD). So far so good ... I hope it won't be that much I've lost ... :o( once again ... thank you Bye Schlabber