Main and external communicate wonderfully, all systems and transfers work perfectly.
Now I connect that external to a laptop via a PCMCIA IEEE1394 card (slot 1). It's running WinXP-Pro2.0. When the drive is attached to the laptop, it is recognized and accessible. The minute I try to copy or paste anything in either direction, I get an error message claiming corrupted files. Not true. Then, WinXP-Pro laptop says it's going to fix it. It wipes out the drive!! This does not happen with any other laptop (all Win98SE) I have.
I'm baffled (and very tired of reformatting this drive on a Win98SE machine (XP says the drive is too big for FAT32 using the Command prompt format procedure so that avenue is closed) and transferring 80gb of files again and again (and now again). I'm open to any suggestions and tinkering.