Again, that was roughly my thought. In years past I'd have used Norton disktools with
some certaintly that it would find what's up. Not sure what to do now. It's formatted
as FAT(32) not NTFS if that helps.

Boot win98's DOS from a floppy and see if you can "see" the drive. Win9x is
much better at dealing with imperfect drive issues than is NT/2000/XP and
plain DOS is even better than win for drive funnies. But try SPINRITE first.