I though I'd report back on the final resolution to this problem.
I discovered by looking through some of the forums that there were a number of posts missing and some users were missing, too. A further investigation showed that it appeared that not all records were exported successfully during my backup. I had been using phpMyAdmin to do an export. I broke up the tables into 4 groups because some (like the posts table) were really large. But even doing this missed some records possibly due to a query length limit restriction.
So I booted up my old master drive and did the backup via mysqldump from root on the system. That worked and got all the records into one file.
I did do the rebuild scripts anyway just to be sure. Even the sticky posts and global announcements that I couldn't access before were fixed.
I appreciate everyone's input above.
