Oh Robert that is awful, that happened to me last October and that is what I did, went and purchased a 16g backup drive, think with a coupon from staples, I paid $60 for it, but so worth the effort. Everyone else, be sure you have a copy of your embroidery designs on a seperate cd or backup drive so you do not loose them, bummer when you have to recreate everything. Took me several months just to get my program to work on the new hard drive because i had to search all over for new drivers because Bernina no longer supports my program version. Took a bit, but finally up and running on laptop.