My husband is (what I call) a computer genius and more often than not...or almost always, he is is able to retrieve data. I think if you find someone who knows what they are doing, they can save it for you...I don't know if the average repair guy does much for these types of things, but someone who is a pro. should be able to do it. A few months ago some people at church told us all their wedding pictures had been lost when they thought their hard drive was lost. They had taken it to a repair place and told there was no hope, but my husband was able to retrieve everything...so, this is why I say, I think that if you take it to someone who you can be sure knows something, they may actually be able to help you. Good luck! By the way, how does a person go about ordering cuttings from you?

Now even I had to look up an acronym - SIL. ;-) Ok, so you have MS Works XLR & WPS files. The problems you are having - or going to have - is that Works is old, and the Office XP Pro your SIL gave you is also old, being actually Office 2002, version 10 of Office. If you don't have too many files, I think your best bet is to try an online file converter. Zamzar claims to be able to open and convert Works files. http://www.zamzar.com/ Save : XLR (spreadsheet) files to xlsx WPS (word) files to docx If you don't want to buy a new version of MS Office, try installing LibreOffice - the newer version of OpenOffice - and it will open xlsx and docx files [ If you want to stick with your SIL's MS Office XP Pro, then convert those files to xls & doc files, respectively. That version of Office is very old though. ] There are other ways of handling this, but probably if you you're going to try anything else, your best bet would be buy MS Works off Ebay or Amazon for $10 or so, open and convert all the files. Btw, you can't even open a .doc file in Office XP Pro ?? That's not a good sign - probably a sign of corruption. Btw #2 - When you say you can't open files, I take it they are on your current hard drive, and not within some compressed backup folder. That is, not within a zip file or the like. Re your backup cds : Can you load one of them, then rummage around in their files and tell us what you find ? (as in, names of files and extensions ?) Most likely they are proprietary formats, but if we know what they are, we could perhaps tell you how to retrieve them. Last, anyway you can get the hard drive back from the repair service ? Probably not, but it would be a second source of backup files. Let us know how it all works out.

I use a Western Digital 80 Gb, external hard drive w/ USB2 conection. This drive has its own power source and does not swamp the USB port. (Most USB ports are protected from shorting. If a device pulls too much current from the port, it shuts down and a re-boot is required to get the port running again. I have a 120 Gb Passport drive for my laptop and the inrush of the drive motor will shut down the port. A "Y" connector is required so that the disc drive can pull power from 2 ports.) To back up my importnt data files, I do not use a "backup" utility that uses data compression and put a group of files into a file set. This harks back to tape drives and limited storge space. I simply copy my important data files using the same folder (directory) structure as on the parent drive. Now, the back up copies are readily available by a simple drag and drop operation. For example, you may have financial data that changes daily. Its simple matter to periodically write copies of the current files to the back up space.

This happened to me 5 months ago. Everything lost. New computer also. I sent my hard drive to California to a co. called Drive Savers ( i think). They first look over the drive to see if anything is recoverable, if not they don't charge anything. if there are recoverable files it can be anywhere from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars to recover. My drive turned out to be shot, nothing recoverable. Thousands of pics lost. I would have paid to have them back. But we did have a limit we would have gone to. Pictures are almost priceless. Thankfully I had downloaded many to Photobucket & had many of them on DH's compute as well. Good luck, I feel for you for sure. It is a sinking feeling to see that blank , blue screen.