I hope you can help.. thanks in advance. All was well,,,I connect by satellite internet and use a linksys wireless router, ssid broadcast turned off but no wep... I had run avg antivirus, adaware 2007 and spybot 1.4 and have not ever gotten anything serious on any scan. Before my last wipe a year ago I had partitioned my hd into a c and a d drive. All my documents are saved to the d drive(thank goodness) but not my desktop or email or bookmarks etc. What a pain.. but not a disaster Now to the problem..I had left the laptop on while I was away from home for a few hours and there was a power outage... not unusual for our country home... When I came home I could not boot the computer. Ultimately when I put in the restore disk and got to the place to choose the drive to load the os, it told me that the c drive was completely free.. wiped..no information on the c drive and it had to be formatted to be used, but the d drive showed as having used space and free space, (so there was info stored and seen on the d drive). After loading the os I found the d drive as I had left it... And again the c and d drives are on one physical drive.. which means the drive did not fail.. A search of the question "what could wipe my hd" told basically of hoaxes. I have done the online scan at housecall.antivirus.com, and loaded avast and scanned in safe mode. Nothing found. all clean on c and d. but I am not sure, my internet (direcway satelite)is slower than usual and the modem lites always seem to be flashing Now, I have dealt with hundreds of computers, but not thousands..Has any one ever had the same type experience, and what could possible have done this? A power surge? (it is plugged into a serge protector) but that would kill the whole drive..A virus? if so did the format kill it? and how to prevent this in the future Thanks again for all thoughts Roseanne

What happened when you attempted to boot? Did you get any errors? It's possible you could have done a Repair if you had an OS CD, but by booting to the Restore CD and reinstalling, you restored to Factory settings..Thereby deleting everything on C and starting over. You may want to consider saving all your data to D. Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

When I tried to boot I got the ram check, a quick flash of the xp loading screen then a flash of blue screen... too quick to read at all...and went on to reboot,, went to the screen with 'last known config' etc... Tried safe mode, with and without networking, command prompt, all with the same result, blue screen and reboot. I tried booting to dos and could get no dir for c or d. That was when I got really worried. What I really needed was on d... The disk I used is a full media center 2005 ,, not actually a 'restore' ..I forgot to mention that I first selected the repair option when booting from the cd and it told me there was no os to repair,, or something like that. That is why I went further and found the vacant c .. I gulped and formatted and reloaded media center.. I had gone to the point of choosing where to load the os twice, seeing the empty c drive and the half full d drive. thanks for your thoughts