"N9WOS" wrote in message
...

(Smiles...)
That's a problem that even I can figure out... :-)
(I have had that problem.)

It's a compressed drive.
Compressed with "drive space" or some other program.
You could get to it with an old boot floppy with the "drive space" system
files on it.
(or what ever files is needed by the compression system used)

Drive Space! Man, I haven't heard that term in 10 years (coincidentally,
since the last time I dealt with this drive).

Put a third clean 200+MB hard drive in with a fat 16 partition.

Is there any way to create a FAT 16 partition on the XP NTFS hard drive
without a re-format? A re-format is really not an option at this time.

Boot with the drive space (or other) driver enabled boot disk.

I tried this just to see if I could look at the drive-spaced data. When I
did this, both the NTFS hard drive (expected) and the Maxtor FAT 16 hard
drive (unexpected) were not recognized, or at least not assigned accessible
drive letters. Strangely enough, the DVD-ROM and the CD-RW were recognized
as R: and S:, respectively. I used "Alt 1" for Dos 6.22 from bootdisk.com

Copy the data off the compressed second drive, to the non compressed third
drive.
Then reboot win xp and get access to the non compressed files.

If a FAT 16 partition cannot be created without a reformat, would there be a
devious way to dump the drive-spaced data to the CD burner, or a USB jump
drive, or something?

I don't know what type of support win xp has for mounting compressed drive
volumes.
The other people here should be able tell you that info.

You'd think think that someone would have developed a little Windows GUI by
now that would allow people access to their DOS-compressed drives in the
modern Windows world.

The 8MB, or so, free space, is the uncompressed space that drive space
reserves for critical drivers that can't be put in a compressed volume.

Thanks again, N9 and all for the help.