Some good ideas here for sure. I don't have any trouble with NTFS myself.
My drive is 200 gig. I did need to flash my BIOS to go over 160 gig.
For two drives to both be bad at the same time sounds like a cable to me.

I had a bad memory stick one time, it must have corrupted a file in windoze. It wouldn't boot. I just booted from the cd and reloaded the file, worked fine.

I would replace the cable to be sure, if that won't work then hook up the drive as the slave in a different computer. Then you can work with it. I keep an older 20 gig drive with a bare install of winxp. If I have problems I can put it as the master and boot the system.

Fat32 ?? The fact that you can't make a partition larger than 32 gig ? shows how old it is. There are thousands of computers running NTFS.

Good luck..