On minor detail, before Graham does something drastic: > 5. If all else fails, do a low level format (e.g., fdisk), rebuild the
"low level format" isn't just a term to throw out because it sounds drastic and important, it's an actual term, and it means something different than just "fdisk, make some partitions, format those partitions". Low-level formatting is something that end-users did done long ago, with MFM and RLL drives. Today, IDE drives are low-level formatted by the manufacturer. End-users should not try to low-level format an IDE drive. You can destroy it. (Yes, some manufacturers offer utilities to do this (or let over-zealous people _think_ they are doing it), but if it gets that far, send the machine back to Dell and tell them to fix it - you just don't want to go down that road). All Graham needs to do (if it gets this far) is "format c:" (which, I guess, would be called a "high-level format"), and maybe before that "fdisk", if he wants to rearrange/resize partitions. Ian
