i got a maxtor 160 gig drive in one of my pc, now windows keeps wanting to run scan disk on it for some unknow reasion, after runing maxtor power tools i noted someing odd, windows says its ntfs, maxtor power tools says fat 16, i think windows is telling me lies because im runing spinrite and that says fat 16 as well, any iders on whats wrong with it ?

Why FAT 16 ? Should be FAT 32 or NTFS !!! Cant u just reformat  ? arent there conversion tools ?

I concur, FAT16 is limited to 2GB so there is no way an entire 160GB drive can be FAT16. My guess is something has gone horribly wrong with the filesystem.

Assuming you can still get to Windows, Id get all the data off of it you can and re-format.