well, i am making my first post as a registered member with a perplexing problem... I have 2 physical harddrives each of which has several partitions most of them are formatted with NTFS thru XP but 1 in particular has FAT32 it just so happens that this partition is 110Gb and full of multimedia... well, it WAS full of multimedia... yesterday morning i awoke to the partition being, well, not gone, but not there either... in win explorer, a click on the drive to view the contents resulted in a message stating "Drive not formatted, Do you wish to format now?" an immediate click on the 'no' option later and i was wontring wtf was going on here. now, i belong to another message board and at least 2 other people there have had the exact same problem... in each case it was a partition with multimedia files on it. Upon searching the net i discovered a few other shockingly similar instances of the same thing. Apparantely the files are ok and viewable thru DOS or even WinME, but not in XP. I'm currently trying out Ontrack Recovery to see if it will fix the problem, but i'm guessing that ontrack will only allow me to recover and relocate files it finds... not having another 110Gb drive around, this is not a feasable solution and will leave me to only recover a portion of the files. Does anyone know what may have happened here? I've been tossing around the idea that some sort of multimedia searching worm has made its way on to the computer. I'm using NAV2004 and PestPatrol, so its unlikely that this is the case. also, does anyone know a way to restore the drive without having to attempt to find a new location for 10,000 music files? thanx for any help!!