SAVE MY MUSIC COLLECTION! PLEASE

I don't mean to come across as trying to add insult to injury, but it seems the larger problem is with the purchased music store(s)? Shouldn't they have a record of what you've bought, and if so, why not let you simply re-download what they know you've already paid for?

As for painful backup lessons.... there are only two kinds of people who use computers -- those that have suffered painful backup lessons, and those who will.

Here's some good reading on the kinds of "gotchas" out there (ignore the product pitch at the end -- I'm not even sure if it's still available):

http://www.taobackup.com/

Be sure to read everything, including the "Click for more information" links on each page. It's all very well thought out and sound advice.

 

You could try one of the Data Recovery software products to scan your FAT32 (even though formatted) and determine if there is anything there that can be recovered.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=data recovery xp

One I have used myself is File Scavanger, but there are others that are also good.

http://www.quetek.com/products3.htm

 

If you do decide to try a data recovery product. I suggest making a copy of your 'unwell' harddrive onto a DVD or perhaps another partition, before letting the recovery program loose.

One thing that makes me think, your files may still be recoverable to some extent, is that the XP file system can report some very interesting things, when things like the file security SSID comes into play. This will always show you folders, but will report the folders as zero bytes. Attaching a current install's SSID to these files (easy to do with XP pro) will suddenly bring these files back to life. This probably isn't the problem in your case as you haven't mentioned an 'access denied' error along with the zero byte report.

Acronis's OS selector software managed to make my harddrive report a size of over 1TB (after a recovery, the MBR reported 3 partitions of 850GB each) , pretty brilliant for a 3 partition 80GB harrdrive - most data was not accessible until I fixed this little problem.


Colin