Don't mind at all.  Any little bit helps, and there were some good points there.

And as for the 10 years without a backup, more like partial backups because until 2 days ago, I didn't have a CD or DVD burner of any sort, and just finally bought a new drive.  But... I've realized something helpful here.  Before I did all this I moved my Quark folder to my new Drive and my full Adobe folder too.  So, I may have saved myself that software. 

Plus there is the backups... supposedly of the "files & settings" which may or may not be all my stuff from the drive.  That's the good news.  So where I am sitting is wondering whether or not now to go foreward, finish off what has been started with the Quick Restore disk and hope it DOES allow me to do a partial restore without scrubbing the drive, or do I take the two drives over to a friends house, see if he can temporarily move the data onto his computer (assuming he has an IDE drive), then take the new drive, run the Quick Restore on that to make it a master, then REINSTALL the data (I hope) to the new drive, and then after that's settled, go back and wipe the old drive and use that as the slave.

I wish I would have listened to my instincts when I started this mess.  Now I have a huge knot to untangle.  :::bangs head on desk till mushy::::