On Fri, 10 May 2013 13:04:01 -0400, m.roth-x6lchVBUigD1P9xLtpHBDw wrote: > I'd guess that whatever infected your system had a protection mechanism, > so that if you tried to backup the whole drive, it would mangle > something on the recipient drive, so that *it* couldn't be examined > easily. I understand. What you're saying was that I shouldn't have backed up my (perhaps compromised) WinXP data onto the external hard disk *from* that very same compromised Windows OS. This makes sense. In hindsight, I should probably have booted to Knoppix, and then used Knoppix to copy the c:\data hierarchy over to the hard drive. Sigh. Now all I need to do is recover the Master File Table, because this Microsoft KB was what I had followed prior: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/176646