Well, I got AW installed, and there's data, and the email works,...... but things are kinda messed up. I always print out copies of invoices to save for my records, so I know what numbers go to what Lots, but I'm finding many missing invoices (the number I have on the hard copy is not found in AW's database), missing Lots (Lots that sold and were associated with shipped Invoices), and I've even got one Store item that I updated on January 11 and sent a Congrats email to the "buyer" that now shows as unsold (on eBay, too). Very weird, because that was at least 5 days before the hard drive failure. I have no email records for that Invoice, so there's no way I can find out who on earth got the notification for the Store Lot that didn't really sell. AW definitely updated this Lot and generated an Invoice but at eBay it says it didn't sell.

And now I've checked a few other things, and I see I've got a huge mess on my hands. For example, filtering for Waiting for Payment shows me two Invoices, both of which are actually Closed (both were shipped in October; I do have the emails for them). And in reality, there are two completely other Invoices that are Waiting for Payment.

Filtering for Buyer Not Contacted (everyone's been contacted) shows four Invoices. In reality, these items all should have different Statuses. The buyer info is all missing except for the User Ids, plus they all have the same Invoice dates and Payment Due dates, and that's totally wrong. AW shows three items Waiting to Ship, but actually there's only one, and it's not even on the list. So deep doo-doo. I'll try to contact Thom tomorrow, but it's the weekend, so I'll have to just wing it for my Sunday auctions, I guess. It looks like everything just got totally shuffled around when I brought it in from the backup.

My only other option is to bring the disk image in, but that is indiscriminate – I can't just copy the AW folders. It would overwrite (??) all the stuff that was done by the tech guy today as well as what I've done this evening. So I'm still in Woe-is-Me condition.

By the way, my hard drive (Western Digital SATA) was four and a half years old and showed no hint it was about to go bad, at least no hint I could detect. One day it worked; next day, it didn't, and Windows wouldn't load (even using the Recovery Console). The tech said he recommends replacing hard drives when they are 3 or 4 years old even if they seem fine.

Sue