Quote Originally Posted by gurdian
Let's talk about networking then. Sorry that I didn't answer the question earlier.

Logically, I have 2 PC's. One is this busted Dell notebook. The other is the Desktop that I'm using right now to do the dvd burning.

Now even IF i do set up a network between these two, where would I copy the data to?

I have about 500 gigs in the desktop but it's all in NTFS format.

OK, I see what you've done and it seems like you only have one computer now, the desktop.

Sometimes when Windows is blown on a laptop, people find that they can still boot Knoppix (obviously there are a lot of things that could happen to a laptop that would prevent that). It sounds like that might have even been the case for you, after all, if your desktop can't read the UBS drive from XP then there must be something mucked up with the directory structure that is confuding XP, and would have confused it on the notebook too. Had you managed to boot Knoppix on the notebook then you could have transfered the files by ethernet to the desktop (desktop still running xp so it can certainly write to ntfs just fine). There are a lot of ways to transfer the files, I would just use FTP.

With the laptop out of the picture, you would need another computer somewhere that you could transfer too to avoid writing the DVD's. It might still take an awful long time to suck the data off of a (now) usb drive, but at least you wouldn't have to be there to change DVD's as needed, you could go to bed and have a life while the files move to the other system.