Had a great fall ! -SE style

I would like to have some idea of what hit me.
A few mornings back, I find the computer with the vmm32.vxd missing message.
Now that I think about it, something must have forced it to reboot as well.
To complicate matters, this was an upgraded machine, and the upgrade disk
going to SE is the one that only works on 98. That is the machine has to be
up and running to install it. And the machine has no floppy and I never got
around to making a bootable CD. I manage to get into DOS and get into the
windows directory. There are only three folders and most of the files are
missing.

Are the other partitions of the 80 GB HDD accessible in DOS? Maybe it was
me?
And now the question of the updated files for the larger HDD come to mind as
well. Because I decided to proceed with installing Gold and as soon as
completed run the SE upgrade CD. But the scandisk reported numerous errors
on C. Other partitions OK. It reported a folder named BAER which aroused my
curiosity as I have never had any program, etc. associated with that name on
my machine, to the best of my knowledge of course.

Any help is greatly appreciated because I really want to avoid this mess
again. Current result is that everything will have to be reinstalled.
Machine is currently running and everything remains on the other partitions,
so most of my data is obviously OK. But on the C drive I have a ton of DIR
folders and almost 300 filexxxx.chk files. Registry was obviously lost,
hence the total reinstall. And after much sifting, I will likely find most
of the other data in those DIR's.

After too many failed tape recovery systems, I had decided to dabble with
external USB HDD. Thoughts on this are welcome as well and BTW this isn't
going to well either. Can't break 15MB/s on USB2. And it came with GHOST,
which I have yet installed. I had picked up a copy of Partition Magic 8 at
the same time. At least one of these I tried to install and it failed,
crashed. I thought I uninstalled, but later found folders/files, associated
with some security company that Norton may use as part of antipiracy. I got
rid of what I was aware in that area, but now wonder if there was some
remnant left that timed out at the 30 day not registered and could have went
haywire. What search I've done indicates dibeng.dll or was it dib32.dll need
replacing, causation for the vmm32.vxd error, but the files exist in the
created DIR's, possibly indicating as well that everything just got
scrambled.

Definitely need to Get Around to It, and make that bullet proof back up that
will act as a recovery.

Norman