Hi Ben Thanks for the mail. I booted from a boot disk, having put the offending hard drive onto the ide cable by itself (no other drive on the cable) then just formatted it ....success! Harold W Sorry I can't include the thread to all this...for some reason (my provider, perhaps) I am unable to send more than 20 lines of text Ben Moore wrote: ========================= The list's FAQ's can be seen by sending an email to PCWorks-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with FAQ in the subject line. To unsubscribe, subscribe, set Digest or Vacation to on or off, go to //www.freelists.org/list/pcworks . You can also send an email to PCWorks-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with Unsubscribe in the subject line. Your member list settings can be found at //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi/l=pcworks . Once logged in, you have access to numerous other email options. The list archives are located at //www.freelists.org/archives/pcworks/ . All email posted to the list will be placed there in the event anyone needs to look for previous posts. -zxdjhu-