Good morning, Pete;

You lost everything. Bummer. Yes, running an anti-virus software program and having some kind of a back-up data storage system does help.

Please note that these comments are being made by a guy who had two (2) hard disk crashes in 15 months time. Now there are a collection of different devices here for storing copies of my data files. Just this last December 24th, I had my last one, and I fought it for a little over two months, but concluded that it was not going to work, and just bought another computer and started all over again. I might try again to see if I can recover the data from that hard disk by using yet another technique. I am still not sure what will be done with the disk from 2009 September 03. Yes, I can tell you the exact dates when this kind of thing happened. The last time that I did a full system and data back-up was on 2011 April 15.

Enjoy;

Ralph
Latte Land, Washingnton

One of the best ones is : "Recuva" It found ALL my lost photographs that were on the one drive. Even the ones I deleted because they were crap... Was a bit much to handle at once but you can load it again and start over. And it is FREE. I found stuff I did not even know I lost or wish I would have lost.

keep going