Hi Paul and Forum,
Finally, after a year of working with this computer, I can report some progress.
I connected the HP drive to my XP machine via a SATA controller card to begin the recovery process. I was hesitate to use the partitionwizard (now minitool partition recovery) when it said it would delete one or more partitions. I used EaseUS Partition Recovery 5.6.1 instead. It found my E:, G: and lost paratitions. I had to select a lost partition to recover, selected "yes" to continue then "next". The recovery process succeeded and now I have F:, G:. I can now see files I could not see before. I then reconnected the HP hdd to the a6000n and tried to boot. New message: System boot failure. Insert system disk... Rebooted with the Vista boot cd with Repair Console downloaded from previous discussions in this forum. There was no os listed so I selected Repair from the menu anyway and thus started a lengthy process of hours. Selected finish for the repairs to take effect. By the way, this is the first time this has happened in a year. Rebooted.
Booted to Microsoft progress bar with Chinese character text above. Next is a colored pallete background with VISTA TEST super imposed in the centerand a Vista task bar ath the bottom. Then a Command Prompt dialog box opened with FREEDOS TEST and then the header changed to C:\ Test - Chinese characters. Then begins the following lines: C:\TOOLS\DISK.TXT with every line beneath it in Chinese. After about half an hour of this, a dialog box opened in Chinese with a selection button highlighted. I selected that one and the system rebooted. It resumed to the same aforementioned desktop and continued the test which has now been running for approsimately two hours. However, now, there is a screen saver that comes on every 20 minutes. I just move the mouse a little to see the display again to watch the progress. Not that I understand Chinese. LOL : )
Should I interrupt this process and boot to the repair console to see if an os is now listed and possibly get it converted to English? If not, what next? I will continue to allow the test to run until I hear back from you. Thanks for all the help.