save data before reinstall help

Hello,

While running an online virus scanner my Norton Antivirus
popped up a warning and I followed the prompts. After a
few minutes the system became unstable and I had to shut
it down.

When I restarted some of my data was gone. For instance
if I click on "favorites" some links are there, but many
are not. If I click on my "casio" icon none of my digital
photos are there.

I ran a couple of data recovery programs and they found
nothing. Somewhere along the way Windows ME became REALLY
screwed up so I changed that drive over as a slave. I
then went to "my computer" and did a search on the bad
drive for "favorites" and "casio". Both searches found
all of the missing data and what appears to be numerous
duplicate folders with the same name. Some of them have
the same data and others have only partial or no data at
all. This affects more than just to two mentioned folders
used as examples.

What I need to do is make back ups of my data and then
wipe the drive and start again. Is there a method to this
or a program that I can run that will help me with this.
I will be doing back ups to a cd burner and the drive is
100 gig at about 40% full.

Some thoughts I had were to delete data as it is
transfered to the cd to eliminate clutter. I also was
concidering running a program that compares like files to
eliminate duplicates and when everything is complete I was
going to use the Western Digital site to "write zeros" to
this drive so I can have a clean drive to start from.

Any advice offered would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, jeff