On my 8 year old Dell desktop a few years back I was running out of space on the 40GB drive that came with it so I installed a second 60GB drive and moved both my swap file and my documents over to the second drive. Last week I booted the desktop and got a SMART error that the 60GB drive was failing and should be replaced. When I pressed the space bar to continue almost all of my desktop icons were gone. All of what used to be on my desktop still shows up in My Computer when I click on "Desktop" but they are not actually on my desktop anymore.

When I got back from Chicago I tried to clone the 60GB drive but could not because of errors. So instead I cloned the 40GB system drive to a new 160GB drive and installed it in place of the old C drive. The 60GB drive is still in the desktop as the "F" drive. I have moved both the swap file and the My Documents back over to the C drive and now I need to get the rest of the data from the F drive over to the C drive so I can remove the damaged F drive.

I guess I can just copy over what I need as long as it is not in damaged sectors (I have already tried running error correction programs from both Windows and Maxtor with limited success, there are still bad sectors) but how do I get all of my desktop icons to show back up on my actual desktop?

If you can open an explorer window and still see the icons on the desktop, they are just hidden. On Windows XP, try right-clicking on the desktop, select "Arrange Icons By", and click on "Show Desktop Icons". In Win7, right-click on the desktop, select View, and make sure "Show Desktop Icons" has a checkmark in front of it (if you also have Win7 gadgets on your desktop, also make sure "Show Desktop Gadgets" is also checked).

I tried that, Show Desktop Icons is already checked. I did try unchecking and rechecking it but it made no difference. I also tried dragging the missing icons from the Windows Explorer window to the desktop and moving them. On about half of them it gave an error that it could not move because the two were the same but after clicking OK on the error message the icon was indeed moved to the desktop. But on the rest they will not "move". I can copy them, to the desktop but then it shows "copy of ___" and then has two entries in the Desktop folder.

OK, I found that if I delete them from the Desktop folder and then restore them from the recycle bin they go back to both the desktop folder and to the desktop itself. Kind of a strange situation. I also had tried changing the resolution thinking that maybe the icons had somehow moved outside of the viewable area, but had no luck with that attempt. At least I will have them back where they belong but I can't figure how the error happened in the first place.

BTW - since this is an 8 year old system it is running XP Home.

That is weird. It might be worth running scans with chkdsk and system file checker to make sure you don't have some form of file system or system file corruption issue.