well, I got my 320GB drive working, this time I set it up by dividing it into 3 partitions, 2 at about 135GB each, the 3rd at approximately 50GB. I think the issue it didn't work to begin with was two fold: 1. I had originally set it up inside windows (I should've just used the hard drive setup disk I have with my older drives to have formatted it outside of windows); and

2. I had set it up inside windows at sizes greater than 137GB. The first edition of Windows XP did not have large hard drive support, so when I first went in and tried fiddling with it, it was confused. I should have installed service pack 2 before fiddling around with the drive.

But the way it is setup now, I shouldn't have any future problems, even if I reformat my primary drive again say in six months. With it partitioned as is, I can still save a lot of stuff without having to worry about future reformats.

The video stuff that I lost isn't a huge loss. I will just have to download stuff from tape to my computer from scratch. Same with the CDs I'd been converting to MP3. That will have to also be redone. I may have lost some stuff I recorded to my computer regarding media footage my student union got a few years ago (stuff that was on Global, CityTV, etc.). I'm not sure if some of that stuff was in the stuff that was lost or not.

So tonight, as I read for my class, I installed my media players and downloaded up-to-date multimedia codecs. Now I just have my word processor to install, along with Adobe Acrobat.

- Steve