The situation is this. My Vista system began by restarting every two or three hours and now it does not even connect to the network - in other words, it is hosed. I am going to re-load from scratch but would like to salvage about 1600 hours of work on the climate project.

Has anyone done this? what tools are there available to recover such work and/or what files do I need to copy over to the new system. Is it possible to transfer a project from, say, vista to a linux platform?

Any responses appreciated.

Do your event logs indicate any type of problem? Have you scheduled a disk scan with sector repair?

If you to a repair install of vista it should leave your existing data and boinc files intact. A repair install involves booting the cd selecting install but when it says it found a system then you allow a repair. This is preferable to reformatting. I am not sure if you can run boinc in safe mode with networking enabled. Maybe it will work and you can then upload what you got.

Have you tried any of the restore points that are created automatically by vista?

This is covered in one of the README posts on the climate project, here. The one you need is Running the model, near the bottom.

Basically, zip the entire BOINC folder, (for version 5), or the entire BOINC data section, (for version 6), and copy this to a cd/dvd.
On the new machine, copy the backup to the same location, and then install BOINC in this location.

You can't transfer a climate model from Windows to Linux.
This too is covered in the README posts.

If you have further questions, you can always ask on the project.

Thank you for the responses. I am glad it is as simple as copying the folder and does not include registry settings etc.
For the record, I had tried rolling back to an earlier backup point at which the system was working but with no success. I will have to try something more drastic over the weekend.