Good news!

Collected the new drive (file-server quality model with modern liquid bearings, designed to be thrown around the server room and generally thrashed by busy users) and got the internet PC up and running again, it was really easy, apart from catching 2 naughty viruses within about 6 minutes of connecting to the rest of the planet...it's a dangerous place out there! Anyway, pretty much all the essential protection is now in place...virus checker, spyware tools, peerguardian, a *really* grumpy firewall...so back to business as usual...(with a slightly more aggressive backup policy in place) ;)

Oh, I'm also going to practice what I preach now and get the image absolutely perfect, and then Ghost it (drive cloning tool), so if this happens again it won't take half a day to rebuild, it'll only take 15 minutes to get back to a fully working system...