My Problem:
A Samsung 120 gig IDE hard drive will only show me 1 of 6 directories that are on it. Knoppix file manager lists only 1 directory (48 gigs) but confirms that the drive is 90% full of data that I copied to it earlier.

A little background,
My external 500gig lacie drive has a bad power supply so I had to tear out the SATA drive and access the XFS file system using Knoppix 6 which required me to open the directories as root to get write permissions.
I decided I want to install the SATA hard drive in one of my winXP machines and in order to do that, I would need to remove all my data to another system and reformat the XFS file system to FAT32 so WinXP could use it.

I have an old HP Pavillion computer with a Samsung 120 gig IDE drive and decided I'd tear out the drive and use that as a transfer device to get the data off the 500 gig drive and onto another computer that could burn DVD's.

I removed the samsung 120 gig drive and hooked it up to my XP machine and attempted to format it from the windows explorer file manager. Windows refused to even attempt the format but I'm not sure why. (probably because it detected partitions or an operating system)

I booted from the Knoppix CD, erased all existing files and directories and partitions using Gparted and the knoppix file manager and was left with about 120 gigs of unallocated space.

I started up Windows XP again and attempted to format the drive to FAT32 and again failed. This time, I opened up a DOS window and used the format command and it worked. It took about an hour for the format to complete and a chkdsk command showed everything was OK.

The next thing I did was to hook up the 500 gig Sata drive with the XFS file system and the 120 gig IDE drive with the FAT32 system to my machine and boot up from the knoppix cd rom so that I could transfer files from the 500 to the 120.
I transfered about 100 gigs worth in 6 different directories.

I removed the 120 gig drive and hooked it up to a different winXP machine so I could burn the files to a DVD. The winXP machine wouldnt recognize the drive as having any file system and asked if I wanted to Format it. HUH???

I hook the drive back up to my WinXP machine and I get the same thing.

I then boot from the Knoppix CD again to see what's going on and I find that there is only 1 directory showing in the file manager. The other 5 have disappeared..
The 1 directory that is showing has about 48 gigs in it when it should have 68 gigs. The other 5 are just gone. But wait! There's more.

When I open up a terminal window (looks like DOS to me) and I type DIR (on the freak chance that is actually a valid linux command), the directory listing shows all 6 directories !!!

I figured out how to change directories in the linux/knoppix terminal window and was able to go into the 1 directory that shows up in the file manager window. When I try to go into any of the other 5 directories, I get an error "input/output error".

I should also note that the knoppix file manager says that the 120 gig disc has only 18 gigs free even though it shows only 1 directory with 48 gigs in it.

What is going on? HELP!