Originally posted by dragonfx always have it partitioned in two... and one windows installation in each partition... af the error isnt excessibly catastrophical you can retrieve info from one parition to the other... thanks for that advice, i always partition the drive into more than 2 partitions. but when i say dead, i mean dead. not just one partition, but the whole drive. and unfortunately you can only stuff one hdd in a notebook - or i would have 2 and manually mirror my data to be on both physical drives.