Rick, fdisk is a good suggestion, but a less likely cause you should still consider is that the drive is from an old bios pc. It may have a drive manufacturer's program like Western Digital's EZ-BIOS installed on it. It may have been fdisked without LBA support enabled in CMOS, or you may not have enabled LBA in your cmos. Any of these can cause seeks to physical disk sectors that don't exist, with the result the drive hangs and scandisk freezes. Make sure your cmos recognizes the full drive size, then using fdisk remove all partitions and add a primary dos partition and set it active. Tom Turak -----Original Message----- From: Rick Thornton [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:21 PM Hi, I am trying to rebuild an old Pentium 166 with 32 meg ram. i FOUND A 640 mEG hdd Which I was told works. It is recognized on boot up. When I try to load an OS it goes to scandisk and stops there with no activity. When I try to format it it says it can't read the drive. Is the drive stuffed or am I doing something wrong? The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech support at our newest website: http://freepctech.com