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Well, I'm still working my way through this. The instructions for slipstreaming had an error in one of the commands. Or rather, on my wife's XP computer, the command had to be changed slightly in order to make the integration step work. That provided 10 or 15 minutes of agony, but I finally got it sorted.

Then, my wife's computer has an old CD burner that apparently doesn't work for burning, probably needs some long-discarded software installed. I'll have to wait until the 3rd PC in the house is freed up so I can start all over again. I know the CD burner in that one works. It doesn't have a burning app, so I'll have to DL and install one - probably Nero 7, which has a trial version.

So, I'm still working through some stuff. Isn't Windows XP supposed to be easy? LOL.

Thank you all for your help. Please my post #152 for an interim explanation of what's been happening.

I wish I had put the drive in another PC and run chkdsk on it FIRST. It might have resolved everything, but maybe not.

In any event, the tip that 'This is a Lame ID' gave me about slipstreaming was worth the extra agony. Once I figured out that one of the switches in a couple of the commands listed in the link he posted should have been typed as /s instead of -s (for example) on my wife's system, everything went pretty smoothly.

The drive is now living happily in this same computer as a third drive, through an ATA PCI card, and it doesn't show the slightest indication of having any problems. I haven't lost any data whatsoever. The only hitch at the moment is that I've misplaced a CD I bought with updated software for my Epson Perfection 1650. The software that Epson has for it doesn't work in SP2.

Everything else is working great. So again, thank you all for helping me. This is the greatest place for getting help with computer problems. Even though I've built 6 or 10 computers, I'm not a top dog when it comes to WinXP software problems.

I hope I haven't missed pinging anyone with this reply. I tried to get everyone who replied on this thread.