Had to go out for a while this evening, but when I returned I ran "Disk Utility" and it reports that the drive is fine. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'm not taking chances. I've already copied files from it to an external drive and tomorrow evening when I get home from work I'm going to download and install SuperDuper and use that to clone the drive before doing anything else. At the rate I'm going -- busy weekend ahead -- I may or may not get my images uploaded and processed until the beginning of the week! GRRR!!!