As you can tell by my most recent post in the "Sports Babes' forum I'm getting pretty much back to normal here.

A lot of the credit has to go to the folks at PCInspector.de and their software package "File Recovery". It took about 22 hours to scan throught the crashed hard drive but it recovered almost 95% of the existing files.

The fact that their software worked didn't surprise me but their marketing practices did. This is from their "Support Our Jobs" page..

With “Pay What You Want” CONVAR is going a new way in software distribution. You pay what you want – what you think our software is worth – or what you can pay!

It does not matter if you are going to pay us 10 Cent, 1, 2, 5 or 10 $. Every single Cent will help us to develop better and faster versions of PC Inspector data recovery tools

You can make a secure payment to us using PAYPAL – the leading online payment system from eBay.

That's a pretty cool payment philosophy and a good one in this day and age IMO. Cooler, I have a question for you on software because I have an issue I haven't been able to solve for awhile now. I have 3 laptops, a PC, and a NAS device. Also I have a huge MP3 and digital picture collection that is on all systems. Do you know of any software that can automatically sync these folders for me? I get sick of manually adding or deleting things in one location and needing to do it in the other 4. It would save a ton of time to be able to have them synched in the background. Glad you got most of your files back.

if I understand your question correctly (always an iffy situation at 2am ) I can offer some suggestions...

Foldermatch offers a demo ($35 full version)
Allway Sync has a freeware utility
AJCsoft has a free 30 day trial version
and tgrmn has Vice Versa $59.95 however they also offer a 30 free demo version.