JohnInKansas:

Thank you for both your posts: Re: The first post, my first failure was a high priced IBM (Hitachi) drive and it failed over time so I was able to pull anything I had not yet saved off of it. I was told IBM (Hitachi) drives are typically held in high regard.

Both other hard drive failures have been Maxtors, and for the time being I don't buy that brand, although the company made no problems about replacing them after their own software judged the drives at fault.

I believe in using the hell out of one's computer equipment. By this I mean no less than turn them on and use them and don't turn them off for the first four weeks of use. It's called 'burn-in'. I had a Samsung Monitor fail after two hours of use. CompUSA wouldnt let me change brands and they had one leftover Samsung in a battered box but it turned out to work well for years.

As to FAT32 vs other formats, XP is limited to formatting FAT partitions to 32 GB or less. But there is no technical reason to limit it this way as far as I know. I noticed that my most excellent ACOM external 250 GB unit which has yet to give me any trouble whatsoever after a lot of use, incorporates a standard Western Digital drive formatted as one large FAT32.

Caution: Win XP (whether Home or Pro) does not handle single partitions of more than 133 GB unless you have upgraded to SP1.

Anyhow, I have taken to formatting my large drives to FAT32 single partition by using Linux to format to 'FAT32 Win95' which I believe allows long file names. All 3 of my machines seem to see everything on these large drives: the Win2K, the WinXP, and the Linux.

Back to my problem drive. It ran and functioned just fine on XP Pro, and at the time I knew less about formatting so it was formatted by Win XP to be NTSC one large partition. The system suddenly wouldn't boot and gave me an error message like "Can't find the NTLDR" I pulled what I thought was the proper bit of file from another machine but all I got was a different error message. It was all some time ago. Anyhow, as I stated above, I re-installed WinXP Pro hoping that install would simply fix the existing WinXP Pro but it didn't, it required a total reinstall, and after I was back up and on-line, I discovered that about half my music folders had disappeared, but, oddly, not all of them. It was like having a subset there of what I remembered.

At that time I didn't mess around with file formats, but as hard drives have been getting cheaper I have held off adding any info to the problem drive I just need to learn to know linux better and then I'll go through it with a fine toothed comb.

Sorry to run on so long.