[befuddled]

I noticed you got it done. Excellent! I am a little late to the game, but it's still worth mentioning you should image your drives/partitions. There are many fine imaging programs, such as Paragon and Acronis. I've used a lesser known product, Terabyte Software's Image for Windows, which has worked very well for me.

Having imaging software and making images is something everyone should do, especially on your drive that the PC boots from and that holds all your programs. If the drive crashes, you get a new one and restore the image. *Snap* you're back up and running in short order. Everything is there just as it was on the day you made the image: the OS, the installed applications, and all user data. Naturally, any programs or data you added after that date are not on that image.

It's worth mentioning that the image is exactly that -- an image. If the drive(s) you imaged were infected with viruses, the image will retain them and restore them when you restore the image to a new drive. So, keep that in mind. Viruses are another reason that you should have a drive image on hand. In this case, an image of a fresh, clean install of your OS and applications that is virus free. If you ever get badly infected, you restore your clean image and you're back in business with a clean machine.

If you've not used imaging software, I urge you to buy some and learn to use it Besides being able to restore the image of one drive to another drive and be back up and running in short order, the image doubles as a data backup. Most, if not all, imaging software lets you mount the image and copy files from it. And, really, you should make 2 images, because nothing's perfect. Remember: when it comes to your data, paranoia is your best friend.