This may not completely answer your question, but here is the way I have accomplished dealing with the death of a hard drive. First of all, you should always be prepared for your hard drive to crash and be totally unrecoverable. New hard drives come naked. The operating system and all programs must be installed. I think of a hard drive as being divided into three sections: operating, programs, and data. When people talk of loosing everything, they are really talking about the loss of data. All of your data should be backed up on a regular basis. You should determine how often you back up in direct relationship to how much time you want to spend reentering all that is gone. Keep all original program disks in a safe place - along with codes and numbers necessary for installation. Make a backup of all free programs or updates you have downloaded from the net. Make timely backups of all data. While these things can never prevent a crash or the desire to replace an existing hard drive, they will make your transition easier. I've done it both the easy way and the hard way and easier is better. :) J Varick wrote: > We are replacing the CPU on this computer (just got this one in July and > I lost lots of stuff - particularly my address book when we installed > this one). > > > > The one thing I am most careful about is my FO - that is the first thing > I "transfer" and it made the move much more gracefully than did I. > > > > Please, kind computer experts and others, how do you manage to make the > move and not lose anything? > > > > Floreda > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ==== FAMILY-ORIGINS-USERS Mailing List ==== > PLEASE send personal replies and "THANK YOU" message privately. All messages on this list are archived and archiving takes up valuable space. > > -- Joyce Ragels Tucson Arizona USA Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. - Mark Twain