How do I "own" my wallet

[topslop1]

Okay, so I have miners mining and bitcoins being sent to an address that I had on my computer.  I re-installed Windows and now am trying to figure out how I have 'ownership' of the wallet or how I can access the wallet online now?  I am having trouble figuring out how to open it up within the bitcoin client again. 

[Maged]

Use this to attempt to recover your Bitcoins:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25091.0

[Revalin]

The keys to access your coins are in the wallet.dat file.  Hopefully you saved a copy of this before you reinstalled.  If you didn't format the hard drive when you reinstalled, do a file search for wallet.dat.  The tool maged linked will find it if it hasn't been overwritten yet.  You can also recover your coins if you have an older backup copy of your wallet.dat - it's valid for up to 100 transactions after the last backup.

If you can't recover this file at all, your coins are gone.

[topslop1]

Okay, so what should I do to ensure that this does not happen again 

[Revalin]

Backups!  At minimum get a USB flash drive and save a copy of your wallet.dat after every few dozen transactions.  if you have a lot of coins some offsite backups are also in order.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet#Backup

Did you have any luck with the recovery tool?

[topslop1]

If I'm on Windows and I boot up with say Ubuntu off of a flash drive and run that will it still work okay?

[Revalin]

Yes, it just scans the raw disk for anything that looks like valid keys and saves them.

The sooner you do it the better!  The more you use the system the more likely it is to be overwritten.

[topslop1]

Okay I'll throw Ubuntu on it and give it a shot.  Wish me luck.