[art]

Its a long story.....
I bought an external h/d a few months ago. its a Maxtor 300gb.
From the time I first installed it I have had trouble. It took me quite a while to get XP pro to pick the h/d up,when it did the drive had 2 partitions in fat32 so I reformatted to the ntfs system. That was no trouble but I still had problems trying to get xp to pick up the drive. I checked my drivers for it and the usb2 drivers, everything was ok. Then on one boot up a few days ago the drive would not be recognized so I decided to restart the pc as I clicked the button I noticed very quickly a window open as if the pc was reading something and then an error message. I have no idea what they were as they were too quick as the pc shut down.
So after around 20 attempts to reboot hopeing the drive would be recognizzed with no luck I decided to try something. I took out my original drive from the pc and took the maxtor out of its case and put it in the comp.
Installed winxp on the drive then looked in my computer to find that the installation was on a 148gb partition, and the rest of the drive had vanished!
I looked in drive manager, that did not pick the rest of the drive up and installed partition magic which also did not pick it up.
I have my original h/d back now. Is there a program that will restore the drive to factory settings so I can install the drive internaly as a slave? I hear that there are programs to restore drives that can be written to floppy...

Thanks for any advice. It is greatly appreciated.