Here is my situation. I was surfing the web on my two year old Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop with Windows Vista when the computer froze and locked up. I could not click on anything or do anything. I restarted the computer. As it restarted the Windows Startup Repair window came up. It scanned my computer and found errors that it could not fix automatically. It told me that there was no operating system installed. I went online and troubleshot the computer as best as I could. I did not want to lose the information on my hard drive so I went out and bought a new one and installed Windows Vista on it. After two months, no problems. I ordered a case and USB connector for the old hard drive. When I plugged it in to the computer and looked inside the files I was stunned. All the files under my username were gone. Windows said the folder was empty. How could this be? I found data recovery software that scanned my old hard drive and was able to recover all my files. The files were only lost; they were sitting on the hard drive but could not be accessed except after the data recovery software did its job. I have been trolling the web looking for answers. Can anyone explain why or how this could have happened? What can be done to prevent this from happening again?