So the old Maxtor drive is off at the data recovery place - gosh knows how much that will set me back. In the meantime, I've got the Windows box friends dropped off. I reformatted the external drive for that to Fat32 in hopes that Knoppixx would be able to mount it read/write (no joy using NTFS there). It's been a bad couple of days...

Update: Finally some small joy. The data transfer to the Fat32 USB drive is going well, and should be done in 10 minutes or so. Fortunately, they hadn't installed much on the system yet.