thanks so much for the support and advice....I ordered the cd about 3 days ago so am waiting for it to come in the mail. Hopefully it's a good burn (I've noticed a lot of people who have tried to burn their own cd and it's a bad burn or other glitches) so from that angle, I hope the cd itself runs okay. I will definitely let you know how it turns out....I'm stressing a lot over this as I have so much that i don't want to lose off the drive and am in a time crunch, but knoppix does seem to be a good first step. I may run into problems with changing the bios to boot from the cd first, but will handle that when i get to it. for now, just waiting on the cd arrival in regular mail. thanks again, if this $3.95 disc works it'll be a godsend vs. more expensive "recovery" software I've seen out there....