robomatic -

You may have a problem with the HD format options on your WinXP machine. WinXP can read FAT32 volumes up to a couple of TB, but by design they limited the partition size that it can create and/or format, in FAT formats, to something pretty small. I think I recall something like 30 GB(?). If you've moved FAT16 or FAT32 format partitions around, you may have run into problems in properly defining and setting them up because of this limitation.

Lots of 160 GB and larger hard drives come preformatted as single partition FAT32 drives, and work ok in WinXP, but if you try to repartition them you have to observe significantly lower WinXP limits on partition size - or use a DOS boot from a Win98 instl to do the partitioning and formats (a MickeySoft suggested work-around, in fact). They apparently assumed that anyone using partitions larger than 20 or 30 GB would use NTFS format like they recommend.

There are several "data recovery programs" that claim good results getting stuff back from "lost format" drives, but I don't know of a free one. Several give you a free trial download, that will tell you if it found something; but you have to save the "analysis result" and send them money to unlock the "save the files" ability. (I've seen very good reports on these programs from camera chip users, as these seem to lose format fairly easily; but on large hard drives they can take hours, or days, for a full scan, so plan on a long session if you try one.)

John