Last Friday I set up cable Internet access, discarding the old ultra-slow DSL. I had an extra layer of security in my computer from work, Cisco VPN software that allowed me to access secure computers at work. Cisco wasn't playing nicely with the new LAN setup, so to work out the bugs I uninstalled (via Control Panel) the Cisco VPN software.

Perhaps some of you know where this is going. Cisco left quietly, but took may critical DLL files with it. I couldn't even get a blinking cursor on the screen the next morning when I rebooted the computer. No way to reach system restore, and I tried booting with the XP Pro disk and another time with the Symantec Ghost (12) disk.

Cutting past all of the intermediate things I have tried, I have determined that my disk (200GB, original with computer) is just fine, but after running the computer's own recovery program (XP-home) and upgrading to XP-Pro (with my disk) I now have a outer shell operating system and I can SEE all of my program files, but of course, they're not in the registry now. And I can't log onto any of my files to get to my desktop, my favorites, all sorts of stuff. I can run Picassa and it sees gobs of image files but it doesn't reach the most important ones, behind the password, and while I know where the file is where it originates, I haven't got it open yet.

I am planning, since all of this happened, to redo a few things. One must always regard this as an opportunity or one curses the gods that would allow a full 10-days of time off from work to go to computer restoration instead of something useful like finishing the tile on the floor in the hall, or digging next springs veggie garden. Or reading a book. Anyway, I am going to put in a new router and redo some phone lines, now that the DSL is out. And I'm going to order a larger hard drive and put this one in a hard drive enclosure (no expansion room) in the slave position. I had something like this happen before on my son's computer, and I'm sure I spoke about it here, so I'll look it up, but in December of 2008, are the answers still the same? Are there any new programs or practices available to let me reach this access-denied data on my old hard drive?

Oh, also, I'm ordering through NewEgg (wonderful place, I'd forgotten about it until recently, but they give Fry's a nice run for their money on some things). I'm looking at a 660GB hard drive, and am going to go with the larger cache (32 whatever) instead of 8 or 16. I was told by a computer programming instructor years ago that the cache is responsible for much of the speed of a disk. They're all 7200rpm these days. The disk is SATA, and that's what I'll replace it with. I'm also going to get a large hard drive (a terabyte--they're so cheap now!) and run weekly Ghost backups. For all that I was certain I had done a full backup this summer, I could only find one from March 2007, and even then, I couldn't overwrite the hard disk, I could only add it into the new existing OS. But at least I'd have all of the data.

Bill D, John in Kansas, Garg, a few of you other techies out there, any thoughts?   

SRS