Ok you techs. I am looking for help. I will try to be as brief as I can but give you all the info that you might need to help me. I have a friend (made through contacting computing.net)who lives in Turkey. He has a Hewlett Packard Pentium 2 300mhz laptop that will not recognise the HDD on boot up. The specs for the machine are as follows Model Hewlett Packard Omnibook XE2(DB) Model:F1726W HDD:Hitachi-DK239A-48 Firmware:OOXSAOFO MaxLBA:9514259 The BIOS recognises the HDD as Type : AUTO Primary master 4871 MB Cylinders : 10068 Heads : 15 Sectors : 63 LBA mode control enabled 32 bitI/O enabled Transfer mode ; Fast P104 Smart monitering Enabled It has a Pheonix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 which on boot up (WIN 98 floppy or CD) puts to the screen during the POST all the correct information, but does not allocate the HDD a letter. FDISK reports ERROR READING FIXED DISK although FDISK /STATUS does show the disk size correctly .. MBYTES 4636 FREE 4636 USAGE=0% The problem started when he had a disk I/O error message. He tried to remedy by using a recovery disk and then NORTON 2000 which identified bad sectors and so say corrected. My friend then tried to repartition and reformat etc but found that he could not access the HDD. From that time on, the computer no longer recognised the HDD at boot up. Norton also reported an error in the CMOS, but gave no details, and then gave a message that a LOW LEVEL FORMAT would be needed to correct a HDD error. On boot up from WIN98 floppy it was reported that there was no valid FAT or FAT32 partion .. (run FDISK etc) or that he was using a 3rd party partitioning programme etc. Also that it could be a virus. I have tried all that I can to help him from here, but have run out of ideas. I have tried a couple of LLF programmes, one of which was kindly sent to me by DAVEINCAPS but none will recognise the HDD. I have contacted HITACHI who say they do not do LLF programmes but said there were some on the market, although they did not recommend just where to get one. They advised me to go to Hewlett Packard for advice which I did. I e-mailed ALL the above info (and more) but their advice was somewhat technical for me. The Hewlett Packard Hardware Diagnostic Web Mail Support Technician advised me to tell my friend in Turkey to buy a new hard drive. They actually said to phone them (tel. number freely supplied)and discuss the options. Before my friend does take their advice, which I realise at the end of the day may be the only(annoying and defeatest) answer, is there anyone out there who can offer a solution that may help my friend. Does anyone know of a LLF programme that may accomodate an HITACHI HDD. At least if we found one that did, it may prove something. The only other thing that I do not understand, is a remark which is next to the HDD info in the BIOS(see above). It says ALL ITEMS ON THIS MENU CANNOT BE MODIFIED IN ANY MODE(WRITTEN) The HDD was partioned FAT32 running WIN98. What I am afraid of is that there is something wrong in the BIOS that buying a new HDD will not solve, a fact which Hewlett Packard seemed to overlook. Apart from sending it back to HP for analysis and probably paying big money, does anyone have any advice to offer. Please keep the humour to a minimum. Thank you for reading this long post. Glad for any help. Regards Terry PS. To make my day, my wife just came in whom you would not call computerate literate and said that she has just been in the local library and has done a one hour course on how to use the internet and that she now has a certificate to prove her abilities. That's more than I have! Thanks again!

You may need to disable the virus detction in the Bios before trying the low level format