I have an external hard drive that i have about 160 gig worth of avi and mpg files on, i rebooted my computer the other day and now my external hard drive shows up as 'raw' in windows XP the external hard drive was in FAT32, i have been having a hell of a time trying to recover the files, i have used a few programs which have been able to find my files on the hard drive but they are very slow and want to take weeks to copy the 150 gig of data over to my c drive, and the movies come back all chopped up then, I read some one elses post about using partition magic 8 to split the partition and salvage the files, and i just recently heard of a program that re-writes fat32 partition tables, i dont know how to do it and where to get it, i need more help. finding knowledgable people on this issue is very difficult because everyone wants to keep telling me i am screwed but the drive is new and i know its just that my partition table got knocked out and i havent given up hope because i know the files are still there. I was also told that if I was using FAT32 and storing more than 130 gig of data it will be likely to crash like it did. I wish i would have known that ahead of time. Someone please email me or help me. my email again is x083@yahoo.com ;-] thanks!!

you could try ULTIMATE BOOT DISK... Its a free download and it has some utilities on there that has helped me out of some serious partition problems. The last time I used it was when my partition table got completely screwed... I managed to recover 3 out of 4 of the partitions.

Don't use PM! That will cause much more data loss. All the partition table repair tools i have (PartitionTableDoctor and MBRWORK (DOS tools)) work only on an internal ide drive so ... The only usb tool is probably WinHex, however it is not a simple recovery tool, only a direct low level access so you have to know how to do manual repair. Best

Brian: Try to recover partitions first. You can just INSTANTLY convert a large harddrive from FAT to raw with a quick boot up... it just doesn't work that way. My guess is that the data is still there and it's still FAT but the partition table is screwed and telling XP that it's raw.

Sorry ... misspell.. it should read: You CAN'T just instantly...