I've got a problem, I was partitoning my drive with fdisk and was going to reformat it, but it crashed during fdisk, now the harddrive does not boot at all. It goes through the BIOS boot sequence and then just ends with a black screen with just a flashing white cursor in the upper right corner. I've tried using boot disks and none of them will get me to the C: drive. I'm running out of ideas and I'm now guessing it's a corrupted partion table. Any help would be appriciated.

virus? head hit platter? is it making any grinding noises? when you have your boot disk..did you tell BIOS to boot to it? If you did and its still not working it sounds like your hard drive bit the dust or it has a virus...just curious....whats the size and speed of the drive and the manufacturer

You say you now want to format, which means all information will be wiped. If you are happy for this, and because FDISK and FORMAT do not work, I would start by running a low level format. I use the one that comes with PC-CHECK or PCCHECK. Follow this with FDISK and FORMAT as normal. I use:- FORMAT C: /U /C Good luck - keep us posted.

i have EXACTLY the same problem i've done everythin you guys have said above but i keep gettin messages sayin that the harddrive is compressed even thoguh i have low level formatted it about 5 times and fdisked it and formatted it and get te same message,, itsa 10gb hardrive and pretty new any help guys?!

Nope, not a virus, and not the head hitting the platter, it's a new system, and never had much of a chance to get online except to get some drivers. My original problem was conflicting hardware, so I was going to reformat and start over, but I decided to partition it into smaller chunks while I was at it. Well, FDISK failed when I exitted, and now I've got the problem I mentioned above. And to format, it has to recognize there is a drive. FDISK's failure caused all partitioning to be corrupted to a state it doesn't know there ARE any drives there is no C: to target. Just A: for the floppy drive and D: for the DVD-R/RW drive. I have nothing I can target on the harddrive. There in lies the problem. My BIOS doesn't do low-level formatting either.

I have advised you previously of a utility that will low level format. However I think it would be best if you first searched the hdd makers website for a low level formatter, as it will be tailored for their products and thus a better bet. Good luck - keep us posted.

And it's solved. Now I'm back to the original problem, which is more then likely a glitchy video card. Hehe.