External hd keeps getting erased.

[Schopenhauer101]

This mystery has unfortunally been happening way too many times now. Ive lost around 140 gigs of data tree times by now. The drive is a maxtor onetouch with 160 gigs. I use it on a dual boot system with xp and debian/knoppix. It has always been in one partition, fat32. After been using it in xp or when entering xp or sometimes in linux the disk becomes inaccesible. The last time it got destroyed it was during a unwished diskcheck at windows reboot. That time is was unrepairable. I used a recovering software called Get Data Back. And managed to save 30%. In windows it usually defines the filesys as "raw" when this shit happens to me, and then it asks me if i want to format it.

Im thinking if it has to do with the partition being too big for my computer/ or the operative systems, to handle without trouble.
Maybe it has to do with fat32 not beeing a jornaling system, being handled in a slightly different way in linux and xp, and that it creates some kind of conflict on such a big partition. My idea is to split it into 2 partitions. One ntfs and one ext3.

Why is this happening? Is there a good way to erase or wipe the entire hd before partitioning/formating in linux? Can there be filth left at the mbr and partitiontable that i have been having trouble with earlier? Can i clean it with dd if in some way or with fdisk? How? Or is it good enough just to make the two partitions in qtparted and than pray?

Any help whould be great. Is this problem happening someone else with a large external hd?

Take care/
Björn

[OErjan]

some versions of disctools (norton discdoctor is one) and/or antivir can cause this type of activities.
they keep some kind of record of when the disk was last read/modified what files where on it, how the fat looked... if any of these are off the entire disk is considered BAD. i have had this happen between two XP systems aswell as between linux/XP.
just a possibility.
another is that FAT32 can only handle 4G-1B (one byte less that 4 gig) large files, so if your files are larger (DVD ISO's) they are indeed corupt.