Well, it's bound to happen to everyone who has a computer sooner or later. I would have preferred later. Much later. Like maybe never, and now had two bad system crashes in about a year and a half. 

This latest time (first in over four years) was in 2006, when for reasons I still can not fathom, GoBack caused my PC to spontaneously reboot about a dozen times in a day, to the point where I removed a once very useful program. It now does not run on any of our computers. In the process of the reboots, it corrupted y installation of Windows XP, but I tolerated the poor performance, using my laptop instead for most everyday computing.

Rebuild Time

Successfully rebuilt my computer, with a new hard drive, and new burner. After three months of use, I finally obtained a new external hard drive, and using something new for me, Acronis True Image Home 10.0, ran a full back up. Several days later, I ran an incremental back.

Then, fifteen minutes after that back up finished, a loud noise came from inside my box. I thought it was a fan going bad, but upon opening it up, I could find no fans failing. Instead, the noise came from a three month old 500GB SATA Seagate hard drive. Ten minutes later, it completely failed.

BACKUP Your Computer. Period.

Fortunately, a copy of the Acronis True Image Home 10.0 installation program resided on my new external hard disk. I replaced the now fried hard drive, formatted and installed Windows XP from a slipstreamed installation disk with Service Pack 2 on it - a 35 minute installation job, installed Acronis True Image, and ran the restoration portion of the program. Eight hours later, my computer was back where I left off. Perfectly. The most accurate restore I've ever experienced.

Take my word for it: Back Up Your Computer.