[djmcmath]

Alright, after a few weeks of working on this problem, it's time for some follow up. I ended up using a tool named "Recover My Files," which worked reasonably well. Not perfect, and not really good enough, but ... well, ok, here's the break down:

JPG images, like the sort you'd take with a digital camera, were hit and miss. I was able to recover about half of them fully. Fortunately, all of the pictures that were of any real value had been backed up offsite (like wedding pictures, of which there must exist a dozen DVDs with friends and family). The ones that I didn't have backed up were the scans from film, and most of those were unrecoverable. The ones that were recoverable, of course, had no filenames -- and my whole sorting system is based around file names. To go through and find/rename each image would take longer than re-scanning them. Bummer, but not the end of the world.

My ripped music collection was almost a complete loss. While RMF was able to recover most of them, at least partially, many of them were only partially recovered. I had several thousand songs with less than 1 second length -- obviously bogus. Again, it isn't the end of the world -- I'm just not looking forward to re-ripping 30GB of music from my archival storage of CDs. I'm honestly considering just downloading someone else's rips, because it will be faster and easier than doing it myself.

Archives, btw, are great for file recovery systems. For whatever reason, every zip/rar/tgz on the drive survived. Moreover, all the files inside archives survived, and they kept file structure, which really helps.

So the short version is that SlowToady was right -- the best answer is just to wipe the drive and start over fresh. I never figured out what the mis-reported size issue was, but it came up correctly this time in PQMagic, partitioned cleanly and everything. I'm now looking at half-TB external drives, and plan on purchasing one for backup soon.

Thanks for the help, everyone.

Dan