>This is worse than I thought. All four PCs are hosed. This from the Mac, the only computer that will connect to the internet. The PCs are all reporting viruses. Worse, my backup drive got dusted. All my work, all my finances, everything gone. You may not see me for a while.

Mike,

sorry to hear that. I had feared some silent data corruption during operation (but from OS, not virus trouble) which was the reason for my tips to use boot cd's and make a copy FIRST.

Usually I'ld recommend a slow night with 2 or 3 beers watching some escape flick, in your case probably the best is to get out of the house for a few H either jogging or walking - depending on personal preference you might oogle some women.

Get your mind off the problem first! Then using a knoppix or other linux boot CD/DVD check those drives. I the technical term "dusted" might only mean the MBR of the drive is unavailable or that it, after a thoughtless reformat to NTFS from FAT is unreadable from the MAC. (I have been in such panic situations TWICE [burglary leaving only shrink wrapped backup tapes and removing all those written to and left in the office and laptop HD chip toasted when there were no laptop burners while backing up date to the server inside the security barrier...] and remember overlooking some easy steps first).

Work only off copies of the disks, leaving the original disks for professoinell recovery in the current state. There are some Linux based virus checkers as well, where you can either only check or try to "fix". Linux is here better, as I don't think there are OS-spanning viruses as of yet. Splurge on the disks - 2 or 3 play disks oven sized 500 GB are nothing compared to the troubles of real loss.

On the ultimate boot disk there are tools to make a disk copy using raw sectors - start working from there.

HTH

thomas