From: "Al Thompson" <[log in to unmask]> > Thanks Rick, (and Randy) but this one won't let me make a bootable disk unless I buy it. Put it on the "old pentium" (below) and run it against the drive there(???) > I ran Maxtor's PowerMax 4.09 and it reports both drives as "failing". Is S.M.A.R.T. reporting "ON" in the BIOS? I recently did a data recovery on a Maxtor (circa 2002 -- 6L080L4) that was reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors and the BIOS suggested replacement... > As they are both pretty new drives I doubt these results. I sent back a Maxtor drive that I was SURE was good because their utility said to and they gave me a free new drive... > However, although FDISK lets me create pri-dos, ext-dos and logical partitions, > they all disappearupon reboot - before I can format them. > I'm going to try one of the drives in my old pentium - if I can partition it there, perhaps > this unit's bios is messed up? I use Acronis PartitionExpert for this sort of thing and switch partition sizes around all the time, WITH and with-out data on them... I don't do this on my "production" machine though... (I'm only a little crazy...) > What fools me the most is that the boot drive was fully operational, and I wasn't partitioning > it, so what could I have done to mess up the mbr? Are you sure the drive is Virus free? I bought a drive on EBay once that the guy tested and formatted and thought was perfectly clean, but when hooked into my system I was instantly warned... (Turns out he tested them in a system by themselves with no AV, or other drives attached...) > Even with Maxtor's extensive database, there's little about this kind of problem. It is an "odd-ball" type of problem... > I've partitioned several multiple-drive systems and have never seen anything like this - I'm really at a loss here. I wish you well... Rick Glazier PCBUILD's List Owners: Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>