Please bear with me.....Let me explain what happened.....my laptop is running WinXP home SP1....the owner's name is johndoe......the user name is montecore.....while logged in as montecore I made a snapshot of the system to an external USB2 HD. Against my better judgement I attempted to install SP2 and that completely hosed my system.....I thought OK lets just restore the snapshot of the system....now two things happened:
1) I tried mounting the snapshot image on a virtual drive using my desktop system to see the contents of the image....when I looked at the contents especially for My Documents there was nothing there except with My Files, My Pictures, My Videos but nothing else. Why? Is it b/c I made the snapshot under a user account. How can this be prevented in the future in case I need to recover those files from the mounted drive?
2) After loading the snapshot DOS boot disk to restore the snapshot from the USB2 drive to the laptop HD the restore process started. However it only made it only to 6 to 8% complete and then ERRORED out with SNDOS message and could not find the file header.....this happened with TWO different images in the same place with the same error....very strange. The thought this has to be some type of timing out the USB2 HD is making or the USB2 cable cannot handle this extensive transfer. Any thoughts?
Resolution: I had to buy the laptop to desktop HD adapter. I removed the HD from the external case and hooked that up to the desktop system along with laptop HD....ran the snapshot DOS boot disk and restored the snapshot onto the laptop HD and it worked PERFECTLY and recovered 100%.
Thanks for all your help!