Partitioning info seems to be lost on both hard drives in my XP machine - seen as RAW and no longer NTFS.

To salvage them, I booted to a Helix live CD and could see all my files and directories there. I copied them across my home network (drag and drop interface) to an NTFS external USB hard drive attached to an XP PC and have got them all over, so panic over. (I did it that way as the PC with the disks in wouldn't see the external drive when attached locally.)

However, their timestamps have all changed to the date and time of the copying. While I can live with this if I have to, I'd really like to have another go at copying in a way that can preserve their dates if that's at all possible.

Can anyone please offer any advice? Thanks a lot.

Ok..."drag n drop" from what application? Different applications have different options, some won't let you do it via drag-n-drop, some will. However, you CAN specify that option from the command-line (the "cp -fRp" will do it, getting all files/directories, and preserving permissions/timestamps/ownership). But there's a catch, too...you're going from NTFS, which may or may not like doing that, especially since you've got Windows drives mounted under a live CD version of Linux. You may not be able to, as you would if you had two Linux filesystem drives.