This doesn't sound like a matter of the format type (FAT or NTFS), rather,
this sounds like there may be a compressed drive on the hard drive.
Stacker and Dblspace did this sort of thing.  You run the program and it
looks like you have a 22 gig drive (for example) but what you really have
is your old 11 gig drive fully taken up by a compressed file that holds
your data.  This file is marked as system and hidden, so if your XP is not
set up to show hidden or system files, then you wouldn't see the file on
the drive.
As for how to access it...I'm really not sure.  I would imagine that if it
were a Dblspace drive, Windows should see it (???)  However, if it was
compressed using Stacker or some other utility, you might have a tougher
time of it.  You would need to know what it was compressed with and if
there is an XP version that is compatible with the older version

Tony Mayer



>I recently received an external hard drive that was
>originally formatted in FAT (not sure which was
>chosen, FAT16 or FAT32). I was told that there are
>data files that need to be saved, preferrably onto
>DVD.
>
>When I connected the drive to my box (running Windows
>XP Home), the drive did indeed mount but could not see
>any files. When checking the properties of the drive
>itself, 11mb of data do in fact take up space.
>
>Is there a way to see these files???? Can a drive
>formatted in FAT be reformatted into NTFS without
>losing the data that's currently stored on the
>drive????
>
>Sonny Zaragoza

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