i learnt the hard way

but since then i do a full backup to another drive at least once every few months using acronis. It stores a mirror image of my c drive to another drive (uses about 10 gig to do it) so last time my drive became corrupt i just formatted it completely and rebooted/installed XP etc from d drive using boot disk that it creates for such occaissions and voila everything as it was within about 1 hour.

Steve