A little bit of what might seem as minimal information can go a long way in the right hands.

I also much prefer FAT32 to NTFS but do use both. I boot 98/xp/Suse/Mepis and any partition above 137g is put into linux or NTFS. I normally forget 98 has problems above that point and will corrupt the data. Pure dos does not have that problem.

that made me compare the hex code of my logial drives from each physical drive. i found a discrepency in the &h0...0020 range.
If you compare the data on the first sector (Volume Boot Record) of logical drives (partitions) great care must be used. The VBR (Volume Boot Record) contains both boot code and what is called Bios Parameter Block (BPP). The boot code will be the same for any partition booting XP. The BPP defines the partition in more detail and will be different for all partition on same hdd, but could be the same on different hdd's if the start/end sectors of partitions are the same along with the formatting parameters.