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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.

Thanks for having posted with your problem; it generated a very instructive thread.

During my time in Los Angeles, I listened to both computer shows on KABC and
KFI radio.
The number of times they got calls about dying and dead disk drives
as well as data recovery was innumerable.
In fact, the mantra of the KFI host (Jeff Levy) practically was
"What part of 'back-up' do you not understand!?"

By the way, another thing I do on my computer is nightly backups. I use a program called Backup MyPC from Sonic. The program lets me backup to DVD, which is what I originally did but it quickly became cumbersome. Here's what I ultimately did:

My main drive is 250Gb. I bought a 160Gb drive (mostly because that's what was available) and partitioned it into four 40Gb drives. Each drive keeps a generation of backups. I configured Backup MyPC to do a full system backup to files on the second HD every two weeks and an incremental backup each night of just what changed. Each full backup and associated incremental backups run on separate partitions, so I'm keeping four generations of backups. I use the Task Manager to run the jobs each day.

Lately, I'm beginning to fill up my backup drives, so I'm going to have to reconfigure my backups to be three partitions of approx 53Gb and redo my nightly tasks. It's a bit tedious to set up, but once it's done it's great. The only downside is that Windows XP requires the login ID that runs the jobs to have a password.

I've had to restore from my backups two or three times since doing this, mostly because installs or upgrades of software messed something up. The restore process (for me) is to reinstall Windows XP (doesn't matter which version), then reinstall Backup My PC, then restore the latest full system backup (which should bring XP back to current), then restore all the incremental backups since the last full backup. As luck would have it, my restores were always in the second week of incrementals, meaning about a dozen restores before my system was back.

Once done, everything was back to normal as if the outage never happened. I suppose you could replace a defective C: drive, and then restore your backups to that in order to replace a drive and still have your old configuration in place without losing anything.

-PJ