The trick was, after telling the BIOS to acknowledge that the hard disk was there, to go into uncheck the "Use simple file sharing" box under Advanced Settings in the My Computer -> Tools -> Folder Options -> View area. And then rebooting. We didn't reboot before we tried it last night and it didn't seem to work, so the computer was turned off and we went to bed. This afternoon I heard my 14-year-old son in his "man voice," as his sister calls it, pronouce "Success!!" after he turned on the computer and gave it a try to take over those old files. The files are now all available, and I'll have the kids migrate what they want to the new drive then we'll format the old one. I think there's a setting (there was when you did it in MS DOS ages ago) to identify and flag bad sectors--I imagine the same thing will happen with a modern format using XP, don't you think? It used to feel like such a risky thing with those DOS commands alone. Now the GUIs make it a lot easier.

SRS