Thank you Dromedar very much - On a brighter note - I am working on an encrypted partition on my hard drive that acts as a live volume. I am running my test wallets out of the normal roaming folder that defaults. I was able to creat an obscure folder and encrypt the partition. I am making headway! Thank you once again for your support.
Perhaps you might find something useful here: http://asistec-ti.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=37#p50 (DGB specific, but really BTC specific, and 99% carry over compatibility with DMD). Let me know what you think and any suggestions for improvement you might have (which is already scheduled for when I find time, so your input will certainly be timely).
Good luck with all your recovery efforts.
Thank you HR - that looks like good reading. I keep reading about these virtual machines and I was contemplating setting one up. I have 24gb of ram on my machine so I think I have enough space to create one. However, one question - can I have wallets staking within a virtual machine? How does that work?
You have your second OS installed inside your virtual machine, and then your wallet installed inside of that, and then everything works just like it does on your regular computer with just the normal basic OS install. One distinct advantage is being able to cut and paste between the base OS and the VM OS, but that might be seen as a security weakness arguing for the Ubuntu side by side install with its completely independent boot. The instructions on the Asistec TI forum are pretty complete, I think. Give 'um a whirl and let me know how it goes and which you prefer.