i am having an issue with a 200 gig maxtor drive i recently got, first, i had a hard time formatting it, as the new fdisk would not work,neither would the xp ntfs long format, only the the quick format did it. once that was all done, i had no problems, until a couple weeks ago i noticed when i rebooted, windows wanted to do a file sys check on that drive after every reboot. then today, i rebooted & the bios still sees the drive, as does windows, but now it ask me to format it, as if its a new drive, yet in my sys restore tab, it says the old drive name for the 200 gig, but says its offline.I have also done a bios update this did not fix it. needless to say, i am pissed at the thought of losing almost 200 gigs of data, any help is greatly appreciated.

Your first clue that you were going to have problems was when you settled for the quick format when the regular format wouldn't work. Quick format doesn't check the data area for defects. You were saving data to a mine field. Might want to download the drives utilties and see what they have to say.