I just built a new machine, and Computer Managment won't let me format one of the Seagates. In Disk Managment it's listed as Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition). I assume it's the "System" part that's causing the trouble. Well it's not a system drive, it's blank. Is there any way to force format it within Vista?

I assume you have Vista installed on a different partition or hard drive other than drive c. Under this scenario you cannot format drive c from Vista because it is indeed system drive with hidden files used to boot Vista. i_XpUser

Nope. Vista is on Drive C. I'm trying to format Drive D. When I try to change the drive letter I get this message: Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your volume. This may happen if your volume is a system or boot volume, or has page files. As far as I can tell, it's blank.

You are unable to format a drive inside Vista. And you are unable to format your C Drive which you have Vista on. My mother has been trying to go back to XP. It just says this drive can not be formated. We did Fdisk on it deleted the partition and remade it and tried to format it again. Same thing happened. We called Microsoft and told them of the situation they stated that Vista can not be formated or removed from your hard drive after installing it on there. That Vista isn't really fully completed yet and doesn't have the option to format. Said that if we wanted to get rid of Vista the best bet was to go out and get a new hard drive. So to sum up your problem that you are having.. Quiet honest you're screwed with Vista on your computer you won't be able to format your D Drive. You really only got 2 options to fix your problem. 1) You are trying to format D Drive which I hope is 2 different hard drives. If they are 2 different hard drives I suggest removing C Drive / unhooking the cables. (( if they are both on the same hard drive then yeah your screwed )) 2) Buy a new hard drive for C and install something other than Vista (( that is if C and D isn't on the same hard drive, if not you don't have to buy another you'll just be one hard drive short and use what you have as your D drive now )) I hope that helps