Two nights ago I was downloading some files and my computer locked up. I tried to reboot & receive the message that normally appears when a non-system disk is in the A drive. However, there was no disk in drive A. Finally I put the Windows ME start-up disk in drive A and was able to get to the C: drive via DOS. I tried this later and received the message" that my "Drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT32 partition." Now it seems I cannot even access Drive C. Is there anyway other than reformatting my drive and losing all my precious data (that I stupidly did not back up)? My one year warranty ran out one week prior to this occuring.

1. Is the hard drive detected in the BIOS 2. What does FDISK /STATUS say 3. Possibly a virus Startup with your boot floppy and at A:\ prompt, type FDISK /MBR Nothing happens on screen after you press Enter - it is executed in the background. 4. Hard drive could have just died 5. If you can get to C: drive through DOS, you may be able to retrieve some data to diskette Krystyna

You can try running scandisk from dos and see what happens. Just type scandisk/all at the dos prompt. I believe startdisk.com has a virus scan for dos that you can download and put on a floppy, but I haven't tried it myself.

Recovery utilities such as Norton can recover from damaged partitions using emergency floppies or CD if that can be accessed but this is not easy. Involve an expert if the data is valuable to you. There are also data recovery companies on the web but get your credit card out.