if anyone can help with this predicament I'd be most grateful: - blue screen of death several times in the past week relating to device drivers; - hard drive crash a couple of days ago (am writing this from my five year-old's computer) with corrupted or missing initial Windows file; - have run CHKDSK /F to completion, which must have taken at least five hours as it gets stuck around 3% for an eternity verifying the files (stage 1 of 3) before it gets through the rest. I've gotten most of the stuff I want off the drive, but if I could run my email client one more time and back it up that would be best, if my hard drive isn't totally useless? in DOS I can see the directory tree and all my files, which I can manipulate no problem. is there a way to boot my computer with Windows from a 2gb flash drive (or if I had a bigger flash drive do this?) so I could get my hands on everything I need before attempting a reformat and complete reinstallation of my O/S and everything else? - and just in case, where's the best place to buy a new notebook drive and external interface - to later put my damaged drive in for post data recovery? ;o) - with apologies for being such a N00b... thank you!! NB: everytime I boot the notebook it thinks it's repairing/reinstalling the O/S, and gets as far as the 37/36 minute mark when it should be laying down the files and goes into what looks like an infinite loop, maybe from hard drive damage (?) which my last CHKDSK said was 8kb of bad sectors.