Hi Larry, If you reformatted the hard disk then I assume the system is completely dead now, unable to boot at all. Assuming also that there are no CMOS settings to enable, this leads me to believe you are dealing with an older system that has no On Board IDE, but is using an adapter card for the IDE hard disk controller / floppy disk controller. On the adapter you should find either jumpers that will enable the floppy diskette drives or, a BIOS chip. If you have a BIOS on the controller, especially old VESA local bus controllers, you should be able to enter its setup by pressing a function key. Things could be worse. My old 486 IDE adapters allow you to disable display of the boot up help message that tells you what key to press to enter Disk controller BIOS. If that's the case, or if the BIOS is password protected, I would invest in a new adapter, they are cheap enough for the basic variety. Tom Turak [log in to unmask] Larry wrote: I've run into a couple of machines where I can't access the floppy drives. The drives are connected properly and they function properly in other machines. The problem seems to be something done on/to the hard drives that makes the floppies inaccessible for (probably) security reasons. Reformatting works on some systems, and repartitioning works on others, but on some, neither of these techniques, nor anything else I've tried allows us to access the floppies. The CMOS does not have an option for floppy boot, etc. Larry Atlow Internet:[log in to unmask]