cannot recover from valid ghost 14 restore point

Having difficulty restoring from a recovery point.

 

point is valid.  cannot browse the content, mounting reports a directory error.

 

restored every which way onto a blank bigger disk. diskpart used to reset and retry.

 

restoring the drive reports as successfull, but cannot browse or boot (disk read error )

 

other restore points work fine, with both restore & browse. ( i backed up the original drive and rebuilt from scratch and then backed up the rebuilds ).  I have restored this original backup previously - so I know it did work once.

 

just this point fails ( which is murphys law at its finest - its the only copy of boot disk with data in my docs that i need )

 

originally  dell 620 lattitude with 60gb XP+SP2 drive. ( 45gb used ). restoring it ( and the dell utilities ) in any config. partitions rebuilt - 79mb and 54mb.

 

tried extending. tried forcing other way around. again the restore claims success, rebooting fails.

 

restoring any other recovery point is succesfull every time.

 

dont particularly care how I get to the content of the restore point, just need to get to the docs.

 

now trying to recover a working recovery point, resizing it down to allow a secondary partition big enough to attemp a flat restore without the boot, mbr, sig settings...