Dear All,Many of you might have done this already, but as someone who has just suffered a complete hard drive failure on one of their PCs (luckily not the one I use for FS2002), I have just started to write down full details of my FS2002 installation, in case I ever need to reinstall. I would urge all of you to do the same, as it is amazing how many 'modifications' I have made to FS2002 over the last year, including many new aircraft and sceneries, new textures, new meshes and other utilities. It may take a while, but I plan to make a note of everything I have done to FS2002 (including all settings) and back up all files. Without this, I doubt whether I would ever get FS2002 back to its present state.Boogie.

Boogie, I hear you on that. I have recently begun to keep a daily journal for that purpose with backups of some folders periodically. This is especially relevant now since the new MS Service Pack1 has wiped out my Map View facility info. I am now faced with the dilemma of either dumping SP1, reinstalling FS2k2, or just living without Map View info. I am trying to gather all suggestions and info on "Re-install" at this time. I suspect there will be others soon faced with this problem. What method of unistall-reinstall? What files to transplant. What NOT to forget (AFCAD updates etc.)I have read here some have solved the problem of SP1 by uninstalling it. One post suggest this led to total reinstall of Windows XP and all programs! Just want to reinforce...Be prepared! Paul

This is no fun. I had this happen to me to a certain extent. I had 2 hard drives in my system and I lost the C drive. I had Airport 2.60 installed on my C Drive with a nice collection of add-on's. That was gone. Luckily I had FS2K2 on my D Drive which is now my C Drive. I would suggest 1 of 2 things here1) If you have a CD-RW drive, back up the following folders routinely to a dedicated backup CD. These are the ones I see as most frequently being updated:ADDON SCENERYAIRCRAFTGAUGESTEXTURESOf course there may be others as well. Also all the config files. This way if you have to re-install, you can get back to the same setup sooner without having to look through CD's or disks for addon's. I suggest a re-writeable CD so you can easily overwrite existing folders with updated folders. 2) Another approach, given the low price of hard drives now a days, get a 2nd hard drive if you have the room in your PC. This way, you can back up a lot of stuff more frequently to the 2nd hard drive, along with using it for other software. When I had 2 hard drives installed, I actually bought the 2nd 40 GB hard drive with the intention of just loading FS2K2 on it. Now that I lost my C drive I again only have 1 so I will soon get another and go back to my dual hard drive setup. I think as well if you install just FS2K2 on a clean hard drive, at the beginning, you may get slightly improved performance. I noticed a bit of an improvement but not a lot.Just my 2 cents.Happy Flying,Mark

What does the team think about this extra hard drive business? Is it better to try to install a second drive, or to have an external one? I'm not up to date with the best way to back up large amounts of information these days. All my work stuff fits on one CD backup disk, but I have 23GB of FS2002 stuff. What's the best way to look after that? I am a little twitchy about losing it all; there's months of work there! I'm networked to an older PC, so I suppose a network transfer for storage is one option, right? Last time I tried that, however, and it came up against one gauge file name with unaccepted characters, it stopped the whole process; and tracing what had gone across and what hadn't was a nightmare. It was easier to start again, but I don't want to have to keep doing that with 23GB of stuff just because someone's got a file name upside down.Mark "Dark Moment" Beaumonthttp://www.swiremariners.com/cxkaitak.htmlhttp://www.swiremariners.com/reds.htmlhttp://www.swiremariners.com/cxkaitakv3.jpg