Christine,
Have you checked the jumper links on the drive itself? If the jumpers have been set as "slave" then they will need swapping to either "auto" or "master" before you can use it as a master drive. As for low level formatting, the program I've used for years is a utility called bcwipepd. Make a bootable floppy (if you have a drive in the machine in question, a rarity these days I agree) or a bootable CD then copy the original v1 DOS based version of bcwipepd.exe onto it. Boot from this disk/CD and run the program. It will make your drive appear as though it was fresh out of the factory. It can then be formatted as normal. I've not used the v2 of the utility yet.

More information here:
http://www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipepd.htm

Duncan

As Duncan says regarding the jumpers, then insert your XP disk and use that to format the disk.

Have a look here http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/window...s/reformat.htm

Harry

Duncan, I changed the jumper setting to master and also tried cable select it just won't have it. Its possible that with constant editing and deleting of photo's over the last couple of years, it has become corrupted in the boot sector. Harry, XP won't even get past the checking computer hardware screen, it just locks up or says nftl missing. This is one time when I wish I still had Dos and fdisk.

I have had another go by putting the the drive back as slave and formated it through Windows, it says the drive is healthy and I can load stuff onto it. I moved the jumpers back to master, unpluged the other, put xp disk in cd drive and it still won't load, it comes up with some bad sectors, so locks up.

Go Dell its cheap and reliable. I did what you were doing for years I always had small hangups and glitches. Eventually I had a similar problem a hard drive with a corrupted FAT. I bought from Dell Outlet an Intel 2.8 ghz Core 2 Duo without screen and 200gb SATA drive. After a year I have just added 2gb of RAM now 3gb just to speed things up in when running Lightroom and Elements simultaneously. I run Windows XP Media Center which came with the computer. I will never self build again. I know its fashionable to knock Dell but I am delighted. My son is a Software Developer running an Industrial software company. He uses all Dell machines on business contract and is satisfied.

Thanks carmen, I have a new machine now which I bought from overclockers, they are local to me, its a basic gaming machine the same spec as the Dell I was looking at, being local if I have any problems I can take it back.

Just a final thought I eventually managed to get my disk to work by Repartitioning it as one partition. It is now in an external case as a USB backup device.