Last evening I got impatient and, having failed to find any form of boot using a USB plug in (SD card in an adaptor, hard disk in a caddy, USB stick, all with Linux Mint bootable) I plugged the removed hard drive into a Win7 netbook using the caddy and went inside. The backup partition was not visible but I think I saw everything else. I searched for all spreadsheet files, text files etc and found none that needed saving away. Searched ALL Files with mod, create or access on the day the poop hit the vanes and deleted the lot.
After replacing the drive in the stricken machine it still didn't want to play (no surprise) so I hit F4 and did a reinstall to 2013 status Win 8. It Lives!
I have been pushing it to gather all of the updates and security fixes today. It is getting there.
The lying cheating b'std that rang up and started all of the trouble rang again today! How stupid is that? Didn't withold number but probably didn't provide his own number. The credit card folk must know who/where he is if the money is actually going to get to him. Perhaps they will do something about these scams? No, I thought not.