Maybe I should talk a little less about how good XP is?

*edit*

Now this is weird.

You know how you think "I'll have one last look?" Well I went back to that 750Gb Samsung drive one last time, having moved a lot of data onto the external drive already, and lo and behold, not only dd it open but I was also now able to copy it across. 102.4Gb of data is on it's way at between 5 and 50MB/s. I did do a bit of fiddling around, attempted XP repair etc so I wonder if the (failed) repair actually fixed this drive's access too? The one thing I can't move across is a back file 84Gb in size because the external hard drive is formatted in FAT32 and the max file size in this format is 4Gb.

This is good because it means that I can use that drive to create my new XP install, which should be a bit faster than the older Seagate.

BTW quick question for apple users - do you find occasionally that using an external (apple) keyboard it seems like the computer doesn't always see the letters you type? Just occasionally I'll be SURE I pressed the keys, but there will be gaps in the text, often with 2 or 3 letters in sequence missing. Just happened again.

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Now I need to bite the bullet, wipe and start again.

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Thanks to a Sabayon live CD I'm now saving data from the original main drive onto my external USB drive. It's not too fast because, being a live CD, it has to keep going back to the CD and asking it what to do next. But I'm half way through the first 50Gb containing some of the user data, then next I'll tackle the windows folder. Hope I don't lose too much.

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Although I doubt there's much it can do to fix a failing hard drive, which I suspect is what's happened here.

When I got home last night we had a non-functioning PC. It might be the dreadful HP printer software that I had to uninstall last week, having already done the damage, but I'm just not sure. Currently trying to recover data that's on the secondary drive (750Gb samsung) before wiping that and reinstalling XP. Annoyingly knoppix refused to copy any data onto a USB drive this morning, so I'm giving Sabayon a try instead - the guys that built Sabayon have a slightly more liberal attitude to certain things, and I'm hoping it will ignore those issues.