whats happening with my hdd's and 3 pc's at the same time?

[gooty]

I've been downloading stuff like a madman lately on a win98se machine, removing HDD, then putting it in an XP machine & burning to DVD (long reason as to why).

Anyway, suddenly 2 HDD say they have "crosslinked clusters".

Scandisk resolves this, then a few days later it keeps saying theyre back.

I'm not to bothered with this hassle, but now, another things started happening.

when I put these HDD (plus another thats 100% OK) in either of my 2 XP machines, XP goes to a light blue screen at initial boot with loads of writing about it not being an XP drive (will list what it is soon).

any ideas whats going on?

[PhilEnfield]

Does the drive you are downloading on from W98se, have W98se Operating System on it, or is it formatted as a slave ?

How are you fitting the drive to the XP PC ... i.e. Channel/Master/Slave ? or USB ?

Also ... is you WXP Box NTFS or FAT32 ?

are these Maxtor drives ?

[gooty]

they are slave drives from my old win98se pc (one has 2 partitions, the other only 1), that I have been unplugging the ide/power and then connecting back to the XP pc in the same way.

This has worked OK for months, now its a problem with all the drives at once!!!