Dear Jun, That's a fair question. I should have noted that in my original message. Yes, that was what I tried first. It still tells me that the drive cannot be formatted. Which I've proved to be untrue by using fdisk and format from a Win98 boot disk. Another thing I tried was the Win2k startup disks from the nospin site, and still hung up at the formatting stage. Charles ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ultra" <[log in to unmask]> > This may sound silly, but have you tried to leave the HDD un-partitioned, > and let win2k setup creat partition for you? I have found tha win2k setup is > one of best partition tool. > > Jun Qian > The NOSPIN Group provides a monthly newsletter with great tips, information and ideas: NOSPIN-L, The NOSPIN Magazine Visit our web site to signup: http://freepctech.com