I'd got as far as Arcadia, almost through that level, but I've had to start all over again.
Without going into a lot of detail, I swapped motherboards; my second hard disk where I stored the saved games became invisible after reinstalling Win XP; I loaded a Live Linux OS which saw my saved files and I transferred them to another hard disk.
But lots of saved data had become corrupt, including my Bioshock saved games
Also, lots of Excel 2003 files had become read only, which isn't too much of a problem, I just 'Save As'
Like I said, that's a very brief description, had a few panicky moments there for a while, but it does mean I have to start over with Bioshock.
Still, looking on the bright side, I'm discovering little bits I missed the first time round
And the lesson learnt? - BACKUP
I now have two external hard disks, both in Icy Box caddies, a 160Gb PATA drive and a 250Gb SATA drive.
If you value that file or folder and it's only on a hard disk - SAVE IT, BACK IT UP.
Either to a CD; DVD or if it's a bit big, an external hard disk or internal extra hard disk.
For a few hours I thought I'd lost about three weeks work records, including invoices and stuff
I was lucky, you may not be.
Ok, preaching over