Hard Drive Failed - Lost EVERYTHING!

[BrianG]

Do yourself a favor and get an external (USB or Firewire) harddrive. Then, periodically make disk images of everything. Most disk imaging software has the ability to boot off the CD and read the data from the backup to completely restore everything to a brand new drive.

Or, use the external drive to make backups of whatever you think is important. This can be done using MSBackup (assuming you use XP) via a batch file so it's just a one-click maintenance thing.