[davidigor]

Thanks for your suggestions. The issue is not so much whether I have backups for my data, but whether I can keep alive the laptop which, though old, meets my needs just fine. But thank you very much for your time and your input. I guess I will look for the disk repair software and the various items you mentioned and see what I can afford. And the double post was an accident-it probably happened because I went back in and used an edit feature after I was done.