Software failure is often inevitable. And alot of people don't bother with a back up. Been there, done that, way too many times myself.
But I stumbled upon this website, with a great tutorial by Charlie White. This would have saved my ass most of those times. My boss had this problem and the tutorial bailed him out like a charm. Attatched is a "cleaned up" txt file of the tutorial. Print it out, and when disater strikes it'll be there handy for you. The link to his site is:
http://www.digitalwebcast.com/2002/0..._boot_toot.htm