[Leica] Computer help!!!

[images at InfoAve.Net (Tina Manley)]

Dear LUG:

I am depending on you, especially Brian, to save my sanity.  My computer 
has crashed once again.  I have in my closet 6 Maxtor 250 GB hard drives 
that have failed.  Dell keeps replacing them and they are all under 
warranty which is great, but I have weeks worth of work invested in each 
one.  I have backed them up religiously with Retrospect and, when that 
failed, with Norton Ghost.  The back-up files were stored in Lacie external 
hard drives - one of 120 GB and the other 400 GB (which I have since 
discovered are only Maxtors in a pretty case!!).  They would not show up in 
any search at first but now show up under Norton with no files at 
all.  Dell finally replaced the motherboard with the last failure and I 
thought everything would be o.k.  One week ago, after returning from the 
Middle Ease, I got the blue screen of death.  Nothing would work.  The disk 
diagnostic test says that the disks pass but Windows won't load.  Dell says 
that it is a software problem and sent out a Service Pack 2 for Windows 
XP.  The only problem is that you have to reformat the hard drives and lose 
everything to install it!!!  I had weeks' worth of work on two 250 GB hard 
drives so I took those out of the computer and installed new Western 
Digital hard drives (which I bought!!) to install the new Windows XP, 
SP2.   I've been working on this for a week.  The new installation will not 
recognize my internet connections so I am working on my laptop.  I've 
ordered some external hard drive cases to hook my old SATA hard drives up 
through the USB port and will hopefully be able recover everything on my 
old hard drives.  If not, you will hear me scream.

What I want to know is how to avoid these problems in the future.  I've 
read about RAID systems, but I have no idea what they are or whether they 
would help.  Is there a tutorial about RAID?   I will have internal hard 
drives of 300GB and 250GB (both Western Digital)  and external hard drives 
of 120GB and 400GB (Lacie) and 300GB Western Digital.   In the closet I 
have 6 250GB Maxtor hard drives that fail the diagnostic test.  I've backed 
all of my digital files up on DVDs so I haven't lost those, but slide shows 
and videos that I've worked weeks on have possibly disappeared.  I'm tired 
of spending all of my time on computers instead of photography.  Right now 
I have a rescue program trying to recover the tiff files on one of the 
corrupt hard drives.  It has 1560 minutes to go.

AARRGHHH!!  I am retiring before I pull all of my hair out.  Can anybody 
offer any solutions?

Leically,

Tina