Thanks for responses to my other post,although hope is swiftly fading. I have heard that by going in through RAW mode I can export my inaccesible data to one big file and separate it. Does anyone know what this is, how I can do it or know of any resources on the Web that talks about this mode? Thank you Dave Carter.

Not familiar with 'RAW' mode and the recovery you mentioned, but ... Ontrack's 'Easy Recovery Pro' (http://www.ontrack.com) and PowerQuest's 'Lost and Found' (http://www.powerquest.com) are supposed to be very good at recovering files from drives that are otherwise not accessible.

I'll definitely endorse Easy Recovery Pro... it's saved my butt a few times. I've used it mainly to recover user-deleted files and the odd "RAW" prob when the OS cannot decipher the partition table.

RAW mode is objective bit transfer, lacking any sort of abstraction or OS intervention. The name comes from Unix jargon. In modern scenarios, computer forensic technicians make binary backups, which are bitstream (bit-for-bit) images of partitions (usually just the entire hard drive). You need more than a backup - you need something to interpret file formats and extract recognizable data. Easy Recovery Pro Lite looks good. And upgrade to WinXP when you can. The NT File System is far superior to FAT variants and its journaling features record changes made to the file system before they happen. Thus recovery is almost guaranteed. NTFS alone is worth the upgrade.