Major computer death - what do you figure are best recovery backup survival tools

[plateman]

what I've done if the HD is still good and the OS is trashed is to hook it up slave in another box and see if you can explore it

when my motherboard went bad and while trying to diagnose it, I ruined the OS, so I got another MB used my old HD and pulled what I needed like my bookmarks, music and my webs for frontpage

and just reinstalled my programs on a new HD with a fresh install of xp, infact I still have the drive hooked up and pull as i go, you can even get your old emails, you just gotta know where to look