No Fixed Disk

What used to be on the hard drive? If it's not FAT32, DOS FDISK may not recognize it. Try using the Ranish Partition Manager at http://www.ranish.com/part/. It's a little more flexible and powerful.

Take care,
Mike

You'll have to use the Win2k disk to boot, NTFS will not be visible in Win98 (or dos).

Or if you want to use dos disks with this drive you'll have to run Fdisk then delete the partition, re-create it, then reboot from the floppy and format it, then you can install it again, but I think Win2k setup will allow you to do this (format the drive back to Fat32)

So is it that fdisk does not see the drive or the drive is not seen after you are done with fdisk? Even with file system not recognized by fdisk it still should see the drive. If you boot off of a boot disk can you switch to the c:\? What was theold OS?

I suspect that a BIOS / Drive overlay program is installed on the drive.

This is often installed to work around a motherboard that does not support large hard drives.
Drive overlay software is also installed if you use the manufactures floppy disk to set up the drive.

Check out this Microsoft article on drive overlay programs.

http://tinyurl.com/bhmc

If you have a drive overlay program installed, you need to follow a special procedure to boot from a floppy.
Usually, there is a notice displayed such as Loading EasyBIOS where you can hit a key to enter an option mode.

Chas

A sure fix to this.
Get the hard disk manufacturers utility.
(Download from manufacturers website.)
Prepare floppy, as instructed by manufacturer.
Boot on floppy, and wipe hard disk.
You can now fdisk and reformat.
Regards, Chris

I agree with previous posters that there is something wrong with your original partition. Perhaps it was originally partitioned with one of the various *nix OS's or a partition manager.

The easiest way to correct this problem, if that is the problem, is to download the free Zap utility from IBM at:

http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/zap.exe

This utility has saved me countless hours searching for the "right" way to remove a bad/incompatible partition. It will blow away any partition that exists. Run it by entering "Zap X" where X = the hard disk number starting with 0 (zero) for Drive C.

If we are correct about it being a corrupt or foreign partition, you will be able to partition and format normally after the "zap"