[TideRoll]

I'd say the drive is either physically damaged or not. It's interesting that you can read one partition but not another.

There is more than one FAT, and I suppose it might be possible that the regular FAT was corrupted on the partition you can't read in Windows. There are a number of recovery tools you might think of using. Some are free. There are also some Windows Pre-Installation Environment bootable CDs/DVDs which have some recovery tools integrated, some free, some bootleg, some downloadable. Think of these as bootable bare-bones Windows OS DVDs that give you a graphical interface and a limited number of programs to help you recover your data.

If it has significant actual physical damage to the platters, your prospects without some real fancy help are unfortunately limited. If you have merely scrambled your FAT, you might be in luck.

Or, you could borrow an external drive from a PC friend and plug it into the Mac and copy what you can to it, then plug it into whatever computer you are moving to. Sometimes, it might look like you have more data than you actually do. Recently, I had a disk go down and it looked like I could recover more than I actually could: I started running into a lot of read errors while recovering files to another drive.

Get back with me if you need some suggestions about bootable DVD recovery tools. The external drive from a PC would seem to me to be the most direct way of at least getting what important files that are left off of that drive. bama.tim (at) gmail.com