unfortunately, it doesn't want to read the backup drive on the ancient hard drive after a reboot. that's fine, i'll try again later.

the second disk i'm checking is the hard drive i was using up until last summer, when i decided it was hopelessly compromised, and i'd have to winlite the os to make the laptop usuable. i don't have any reason to think the situation has improved much, but i'm at the point that that's something i'll need to do. for now, what can i get off of it?

it's left how i found it - with a chkdsk that found the email box i was sorting through and the registry that kept corrupting. this was part of what made me convinced i was being attacked - it was, specifically, the registry that kept "corrupting", and usually when i'd left the house, or sometimes even when i was in the shower. i think it was even once when i was sleeping.

let me just back this all up first and then deal with winlting (or vliting it) later. i specifically need to completely wipe out anything related to any sort of remote access or domain access, as it seems like they were trying to slave the machine to an external domain by using remote access as a backdoor.

and, i need to be able to set it up so i can reinstall it quickly, as well.

while i want to get that laptop back online, i'm not at this point convinced that it'll be safe to do it.