Learned the hard way!

[Licinius]

Leave a USB flash pen permanantly fitted to your pc & everytime you shut down, save a snapshot directly to the pen, overwriting the previous version everytime.

Hopefully that will save you the 36 hours of grief that I've just had!

[David@MPL]

What was it? Hard disk failure?

[Licinius]

Windows failed, got a new HDD with the old one now on slave. Easy enough for those who know computers but for somebody who knows how to surf the net & make word documents only....................

[jont]

Just to note that if the snaphost fails for whatever reason it will trash the copy you are over writing

[Licinius]

Thanks for the warning Jont

[completerookie]

make sure your "boot-disk-order" within the bios is set correctly.
example, boot order is CD, Hard-Disk (but never your flash disk)

Mine continually says "no operating system" when I forget to remove my flash-disk.