Get yourself a software utility (Norton Utilities is a good one, but there
are others) that check your hard drive for bad blocks, as well as corrupted
directories and other nastiness. These can be set up to automatically scan
a drive every day or even every few hours. Most will automatically fix any
problems or let you know what's wrong and let you decide. In addition,
Norton will let you completely restore a hard drive that looks like it's a
gonner. Still, there's no substitute for backing up all data.

If you have a huge hard drive (a 4 gig or larger), it's probably better to
either write data to aCD via a CD-R writer (now incredibly cheap) or back
up to a tape drive -- you can set them to do backups of any files that
you've made changes to at night. Just start the program running after
you're done with the computer for the night. This way you always have
current backups of all your files.

Personally, I've found Zip drives too small for my needs. Having to search
through 40 Zip drives for a file isn't my idea of fun (since I have a 4.5
gig hard drive).

Oh, just to make sure we mention shells, I still need some specimens of
Argopecten irradians irradians from New Jersey up to Maine. Naturally I
have material for trade. I find it almost incredible that nobody has any of
these shells (well, one person does, but not as many as I need).

Hope my little post help at least one person from getting the crashed hard
drive blues.

Best regards,
Jim

Jim Miller
Tallahassee, Florida
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