Fat32 Partition trouble

I had a FAT32 partition fail me on my secondary HDD under WinXP. I can view [but not access] the files on the drive in DOS via Win98SE startup disk using the
command. When I do, the pc locks up at the last character of the result of the command [the "files/bytes free" comment at the end, and the cursor does not reappear, nor does it return to the inital dos Prompt, i.e., "d:\_". I have d/l and run TestDisk 6.9 DOS from CGSecurity [what an awesome prog !] and done a repair to the partition it found, per their [well-worded!] instructions, but no change. Any ideas/suggestions would be more than welcome. This is/was heretofore a clean/new partition, and prior to the recent Fdisk/format, the disk was wiped with KillDisk, and I have done an fdisk [on another disk] in the past [with no format disk afterward], to repair a bad partition, and it worked with no loss of data, but I might have been lucky. I have about 5-6GB of irreplaceable data on the disk, and would like to avoid the "hard way" [data recovery] Thank you in advance for your time/consideration.

Sam Lyckholm
R&D Lab Technician
Crestline CA