Hi all, I'm running XP Pro and have three hard drives installed on the pc with multiple partitions on each. Doesn't really matter, but everything has been working fine... until I booted up today. My data drive (secondary, not booting from it) has a couple of FAT32 partitions on it and now suddenly my main data drive is not seen as formatted in XP. The other FAT32 partition on this drive is fine. I see the drive in explorer and when I click on it I get the 'this disk in drive d: is not formatted. do you want to format it now?' message. When booting from a DOS disk I can see the partition fine and do a directory listing and all. Fdisk sees the partition as a FAT32 partition, but XP doesn't seem to think it's formatted at all. My question of course is why when everything has been working fine before, I shut down my pc yesterday after accessing this partition just fine and I boot up today and get his message. I've recently added a new hard drive and such, but this setup has been running just fine until today. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance! Rhindle

try running scandisk to see if that turns up anything, sounds to me like something has caused a problem in the file allocation table (a virus maybe), other than scandisk you could try norton disk doctor. Hope these help Miracle

Thanks for the response. I've subsequently ran a scandisk in DOS with no problems and installed Win98 and it sees the drive no problem. I'm currently copying my files to another drive then going back into XP and format it there I guess. I tried putting the drive in another XP box and the same thing. But Win98 and DOS see it just fine. This is so odd because XP was seeing the partition just fine yesterday! Weird. Anyone that has any other information about this would be great. I've got a workaround, but it is very tedious and time consuming and I'm hopeing after reformatting the drive IN XP that I don't see this problem again. But then what about the other partitions I've formated in the past? Hope to not see this again... Thanks for any further input. =) Rhindle

hey, i can't reformat on XP, i usually restart on MS-Dos mode, but i can't no more, i did wut u said, put in the CD and there should be an option, but there wasn't, theres only, install XP, install optional windows components, perforam additional tasks, and check systems compatibility, i need to reformat baaad, when i put in the boot disk, it loads to ms dos, but i can't type format C:, or type fdisk, it just goes bad command or somethin, some plz help me, my ICQ# is 43626820 if its eaasiyer that way