I have a 40gb boot disk, and nice new secondary IBM Deskstar 180GB. The bios reports the disk as 185GB, and the IBM DOS disk test program sees all the space and reports no hardware errors. However disk manager in XP can see all the space but will not format partitions (It allows you to create them) over some figure between 120gb and 140gb (exact figure to be determined yet). Even if I create and format a smaller partition OK, the rest of the space will not format. XP sits and says formatting for a long while and then reports 'format did not succeed'. I'm using an Intel 845 motherboard but suspect that the fault lies with XP as the bios correctly reports the drive size and the disktest program can see it all. Whilst 120gb is pretty big, I do not want to lose 60gb I've paid for ! any help much appreciated

You'll probably need a disk management program like Partition Magic. Did you try using the FDISK function from the Win 98 boot disk?

Your problem lies elswhere. XP can support disk sizes in excess of 2 TBs. Thats 2 terra bytes = 1000 GBs. Are you using NTFS or Fat32? Fat32 will only format a maximum volume size of 32MBs in XP although it may read a volume > 32Mbs if formatted elsewhere. Stuart

Get the disk prep software from the hard drive manufacturers web site. It is usually very good at avoiding problems associated with partitoning and formatting new drives. It will also work with older drives and ones from other manufacturers so long as there is at least one of their drives in the system.