One way to avoid data loss is to get another new hard drive. A brand new Western Digital or Maxtor 40 GB drive is just $99. Make the new drive your C: drive and leave your old drive electrically disconnected. Install all you can on your new drive from the disks on hand. After being satisfied that all is working OK, then reconnect your former drive electrically, it will become your D: drive. At this point you have a working computer and you can take what ever time is needed to find and transfer over (by copying) such data files from the former drive to the new drive as desired. My own former drive is presently connected but not being used and it holds anything me or my son missed. There are other ways via software, Norton Ghost, DriveCopy etc, but if you are replacing the CPU on a warrantied computer, in effect you are sending the existing drive away when you send the whole box. Someone should be able to copy the entire existing drive to a new drive at a local establishment. Preferred for me, physically keep the present drive, unless the drive is the problem. Another possibility, if a laptop with sufficient excess drive space is available, then transfer everything to the laptop into a special directory using a cable between the two computers. I am about to get a 40 GB drive for my laptop ($120) to make sure I have enough space to do this kind of transfer. It helps to get a return on those educational dollars you spent on the kids. <g> When I sent my laptop to Dell for warranty, I removed the hard drive and sent a machine without any hard drive. That was OK by Dell for keyboard replacement purposes. Paul Studly Cleveland/Chesterland, OH paulstudly@studly.net -----Original Message----- From: Varick [mailto:tallygators@earthlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 7:19 AM To: FAMILY-ORIGINS-USERS-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [FO] CPU replacement >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.