Michael, Assuming the hardware is ok, I think what you might have is a Master Boot Record (MBR) that fdisk doesn't know how to handle or access. Before I do anything with a used drive, I use a DOS utility called wdclear that writes 1's and 0's to the hard drive. You can choose to write to the entire surface, or to the MBR section of the drive. This wipes out ALL information so fdisk can handle the drive. You can get this utility at the Western Digital site or numerous sites found with Google. It requires some sort of DOS boot disk to function. Make sure you read the read me file for instructions on it's use. Note: This really destroys the data on the drive, not just "hiding" it from standard utilities. Hope this helps. Michael At 04:37 AM 12/11/2003 +0000, you wrote: >Hi, can anyone help me out? Ive made what seems to be a nasty mistake. >During a windows install I wanted to repartition my harddrive, ie delete >old partitions/create new/format etc. I found that I could not format one >or delete it using fdisk. Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml