Thanks for that Kyle, I stand corrected. Just one point I'd like to make though, if these Compaqs refuse to keep the proper drive parameters, have you checked the CMOS batteries (longshot that 10 would be bad)? If the batteries are good and Compaq doesn't have a BIOS update to correct this situation, it would seem to me that these computers are prime candidates for being repacked and shipped directly back to Compaq. -----Original Message----- The second consideration is the system you have it in. Typically, the Bigfoots came in Compaq Deathpro 2000 machines. Due to Compaq's little break from industry standard with respect to how it handls system BIOS, the systems are not terribly intuitive when it comes to hard drive detection. What will happen on occasion is the BIOS will detect the number of sectors on the drive to be a few less than what is actually there. This being the case, there will be several allocation unit recovery attempts when formatting because the BIOS does thinks it's formatted the whole drive, when in fact it hasn't. I know this because I went through it on about ten separate occasions. After creating diagnostic floppies and making changes to the BIOS (a very slow process with floppies) to reflect the exact perameters of the drive, the problem went away and the drive formatted properly. Curious about the people moderating your messages? Visit our staff web site: http://nospin.com/pc/staff.html