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Also, are there any good programs for inventorying the contents of hard disks, including hash values for files, so as to allow a comparison of contents?

I think you are describing Tripwire here. From the site Tripwire.com:

Open Source Tripwire and Tripwire Enterprise

If you need to detect changes made to your Linux and UNIX servers, you have three choices - Open Source Tripwire, Tripwire for Servers and Tripwire Enterprise. Although they all share a common heritage, these solutions have significant differences that make them appropriate for different IT environments:

Open Source Tripwire is suitable for monitoring a small number of servers where centralized control and reporting is not needed and professional support is not a requirement.
Tripwire for Servers is the solution for IT organizations requiring only server monitoring, with detailed reporting and optional centralized server management across Linux/UNIX/Windows platforms.
Tripwire Enterprise is the best choice for IT organizations needing to securely audit changes across Linux/UNIX/Windows servers, databases, network devices, desktops, and directory servers.

I think you are describing Tripwire here.

Sounds like it, though I'm running XP (may well switch to Linux before Vista, though).

One of my goals is to inventory some of my old hard drives to ensure that the data that's been copied to new hard drives through a few generations is still the same. At the moment, I'm keeping the old hard drives as a backup, but I don't think I really need my 120MB drive anymore--just want to ensure that everything on it correctly made it to the newer systems before I get rid of it.

Also, are there any good free utilities for recovering files from a hard drive that's been repartitioned but hasn't had a whole lot written to it? I have a 1GB FAT32 drive from a few years back that probably has some stuff I'd like to get off it (I had a decent but not great backup when I took my system in for service, and the service place repartitioned the second drive instead of the first. A demo version of a file-recovery program shows the files still seem to be there, but it doesn't allow recovery).