"Jon" <Jon@peoplepc.com> wrote in message news:...[color=blue]
>I used a WD 120GB Fat32 external UBS drive to move old files from a MS ME
>desktop computer to my Vista ultimate notebook. It worked great. But I
>decided to use the Vista system to scandisk this WD FAT 32 drive to check
>for ay bad sectors.There were none. [Drive G - properties - tools - this
>option will check the fVolume for errors].
>
> Now my MS ME desktop can't read this Fat 32 WD drive after the Vista drive
> error check. It says this drive is not formatted. Sometime it says the
> drive is corrupted. In desktop MS ME, all the files on the drive show up
> like they ae supposed to, but if I click on one and open it, it says this
> file is not there, do I want to create it?
> It looks like Vista just destroyed a good harddrive, which contained 120
> GB of my MS ME backup files.
>
> Unrelated to this problem is my Seagate FreeAgent NTSF exterior drive for
> my Vista notebook - which works great there - cannot be read by my MS ME
> desktop.
> Thanks for any help, Jon[/color]
An update to the above post.
Seagate has told me that the Seagate FreeAgent NTSF USB exterior drive is
actually a Maxtor drive (I assume Seagate had bought out Maxtor in the
past). Seagate does not support runnng their Free Agent on a MS ME computer.
(I sure wish they had stated all this before I bought it.) This drive works
great on my Vista notebook and is so quite I can't hear it running.

The (other) WD 120GB Fat32 external UBS drive works fine if I run in on my
Vista machine, but usually won't run off of my MS ME USB connections.
However, on my MS ME computer, I recently tried moving it to a different USB
socket and it did run perfectly and I could click on a TXT or DOC file or
EXE file and they would all run or do as expected. But while this external
drive was just sitting there running, something happened and all of a sudden
my MS ME flashed an error saying this drive (which was working fine a minute
ago) was not fomatted and did I want to format it now? I also found at this
point, I could no longer read a TXT file or DOC file or run an EXE file on
this drive. One minute the drive works, the next minute it doesn't.
Apparently the drive is really OK, since it runs fine on my Vista computer,
but either on my MS ME computer there's an erratic problem with my USB
connections, or the USB card I had purchased separate from the computer has
a proble, or there's an erratic problem with the external drive' USB cable.
(If I put a flashdrive in the same socket the flash drive works fine.)
Whatever the case, I do not now believe that my Vista "Checkdrive" scan was
the cause of my WD external drive problems, so my apology if my post led
anyone astray.
Jon.