[Discuss] OT, Windoze, Files question

[vze76wjy at myfairpoint.net (Paul Courchene)]

OT (Windoze) simply delete this Email if offended by my stupidity. 

I pose a couple of Win XP file questions because the level of Computing Expertise on this List is worthy of note... 

I recently had some corruption of files or a harddrive crash. 
Took Pentium Boxen to Shop, and ultimately the guy replaced the Harddrive. 
He stated that he could "clone" the old drive and therefore move most of the files onto the new drive... 
With a fresh install of Win XP, everything seemed to work fine except I could not find (or access) any files or data 
except those folders that I just created on the fresh install. 
So, I had a Win XP machine that had no data or files (that I wanted to retrieve...) 
so I created a few boiler plate folders to hold and save common files to be created in the future. 
While sitting there wondering what to do next, I thought that: Hey, I've had good luck with ClamWin in the past, 
so perhaps you should download a fresh version. 
So I installed ClamWin, and said "Lets run it and see what we have?"
While I didn't expect to find any viruses on a fresh install, it was the idea of starting from scratch or "fresh"... 
Much to my amazement, as I watched ClamWin begin a scan, I noticed lots of directorys and files such as:

C:\found.000\dir0056.chk\... 
C:\found.000\dir0059.chk\framemaker5.5\some file
C:\found.000\dir0069.chk\toolbox\matlab\some file
C:\found.000\dir0069.chk\toolbox\matlab\some other file

I. E., a list of dir's and files indexed in ascending fashion.that is, enumerated dirs for applications that were resident 
on the original harddrive, that was supposed to be cloned on to the new drive(?)
So, I recorded some file names and attempted (?) to access those files with the thought of renaming them or 
moving (copy) them into a folder to organize things (a file structure) that made sense to me...)
But of course, when I tried to find specific files of interest
I was totally unsuccessful. So, I have got a lot to learn about file access or retrieval. 

Does anyone know of a file retrieval package, that will work on Win XP?
Is there a way to scan the harddrive as ClamWin does (during a virus search), to identify, read, copy or 
otherwise find a critical file that I should have backed up before all the mess started ?

I tried Windoze "Search" function but it does not recognize or read any of the subject dirs or files
 that are apparently there under some other format (???)

Suggestions, ideas, comments are welcome except:
"You should have backed the machine up!"??? LOL !

paulc

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paulc