backup your data files anyway ... everything might be overkill

and if you have a prescott, i'd wait...

external hard-drive was the best purchase i've ever made ...  just drag my my documents folder to it occassionally and i've got all the backup i need...

it's still a huge hassle to reinstall all my programs when/if things go bad, but i don't lose anything at least

Perhaps we should have a new forum devoted to backup strategy & data recovery problems? This topic must rank along with Viruses & Spyware for importance. How many times do we see posts where users have had a catastophic failure & lost all of their data because they haven't backed up?

Hard drives are cheap - data is priceless

I just copy data etc. to DVD periodically.

This happened on my Dell Dimension 4300S, also.  Windows would not boot AT ALL (not in safe mode, not with last good configuration, and not with system restore) after installing Service Pack 2, so I installed my hard drive in another computer as a slave drive and ran diagnostics on it, and about 3/4 of the data on my drive is "inaccessible" in both Windows and with a DOS boot disk.  My file system is corrupted and my entire (15 GB) My Documents folder (in which I save EVERYTHING) was shown to be not only inaccessible, but EMPTY.  I was able to find these files with data recovery software (although I have not been sent the $100 full version yet so I don't know if I can actually COPY them), but in my humble opinion - and I may be cyber-lynched or something for saying this - I would have to recommend NOT to install service pack 2 until it is KNOWN what is causing this problem with certain computers.  Not ALL computers, granted, but a number of them which I find unacceptable.

Following up on NemesesDB's comment, I'd absolutely agree that external USB drives are the way to go - however, I use a USB enclosure which I can fill with a drive of my choice and, if you use Casper XP (my preference) or another imaging solution, you can backup the whole of your main drive pretty quickly & have a bootable copy that you can swap directly for your system drive in a matter of minutes if things go wrong.

Doing it this way is a great comfort when you're setting out to do something scary like installing SP2.

My security solution works like this:

Main drive partitioned C: OS, D: Programs, E: Data

Second drive which is a bootable Casper XP copy of the above, backed up on a regular basis.

External USB drive which is used for an additional copy of the main hard drive as & when I need (like before doing major upgrades like SP2) - this means I have a separate full system copy which is not likely to taken out by lightning strikes or other unforeseeable circumstances.

Hard drives are now a cheap option - you can buy an 80GB drive for around £32.00 plus tax in the UK, you can buy a Belkin enclosure for £46.00 plus tax or a Chinese equivalent on eBay, that's good enough for backup use, for less than £20.00 including tax & shipping.

This may seem like overkill but it allows me to sleep soundly at night.

Well I use a firewire enclosure actually ...  but to each his own...

Not much to choose between firewire & USB 2.0 in terms of speed  - but as you say, to each his own. I guess dual connection enclosures are the ideal solution