I'll try some more investigating tomorrow.
I have now restored HDD3 to what I believe was it's original state.
'dict1' and 'dict2' directories copied from CD
'Documents' directory with original sub-directories
lost+found
Booting with that still gives HDD3 error. Ctrl-C gets me past that and into the Japanese version of Qtopia. The green hdd light is now flashing slowly regularly all the time - looking for something?
I tried the English conversion from Trisoft but when I get to selecting 'Restore' then selecting 'cf' I get a window with three paragraphs of Japanese and an OK button and the 'Harddrive, sd,cf' dropdown goes blank again. No opportunity to choose the backup file.
The CF card I'm using has a directory called 'Backup_Files' with the unzipped backup in it.
I'm baffled! Any more suggestions will be very welcome.
[ADDENDUM]
I've just seen this on Meanies site:
"The C3100 has a third CD-ROM which contains the files for the Contents_Files directory. However, the sd_map directory (C3100 only) does not apppear to be anywhere on the CDs so make sure you make a backup of it."
Where does the Contents_Files directory go? I don't have a copy of the sd_map directory. Where does that go?
[/ADDENDUM]