Okay... I got a 120 GB HDD Maxtor ATA133/7200 RPM hard drive that I got for Christmas. No problems with this drive I dont believe. I added it to my 40 GB Maxtor HDD, and my 80 GB Maxtor ATA100/5400 RPM HDD. I put the 120 and the 80 on the same chain. All went well for the first few reboots being able to access, transfer, and use the drive and its files, but then I got an error, saying that the first partition on the 80 GB HDD wasnt formatted. I tried several ways to get this partition to work, including using Partition Magic. I found out that I had some "cross-linked" files and tried to find a solution to that.

After a while I just gave up and decided to reformat the drive. I tried to reformat using partion magic, and it said that there were crosslinked files again, and that it couldn't reformat it. I tried using the windows 2000 computer managements' disk management to do it, and it said it was unable to. I restarted the computer again, and then the 80 GB showed up as a 8 GB. I went through maxtors software, and it showed it as an 80 GB HDD. Got back to windows, showed it as an 8 GB again, so i went to FDISK from bootdisk.com, and then it was shown as 80 GB again.

But still I was unable to reformat the drive.

I know the hard drive works right because i ran my operating system off of it for over a year.

Does any have any suggestions or answers?

Mobo is ECS k7VZA 3.6A
512 MB RAM

I noticed recently, also, that my computer has locked up a lot more, and just flash-restarted itself like the power blinks, which it hasnt.

Have you tried scan disk or if that does not help formating it with F-Disk

Regards

Use you maxtors software to set it up.

New hard drives can be a bit of an arse to reformat. I tried recently and it insusted that the drive I was attempting to format was in use. I would try disconnecting you extra drives and just boot with the drive with the OS system on and boot with it to check everything is ok. Then add the drives in one by one. Im not sure how 2k is set out, but in xp, you can go to control panel then admin tools, then pc management, from there you can view disk management and format any drives bar the one with the OS on it.

You havent got a raid array on these hard drives I presume?

Try the above

tried scan disk, but it doesnt even do anything when i try to load it

formatted with fdisk already - got the PC to recognize it was an 80 GB HDD again

tried maxtors software - once again only getting the pc to recognize its an 80 GB hdd

and i dont have a RAID setup yet
its not even a new drive, i used it sucessfully with no problems for a full year-- and about the disk management thing, tried it too...thats when it keeps changing the 80 GB to 8 GB most of the time

I took it to another computer and tried the maxtor software on it again--brought it back to my pc, didnt help

so then i tried the maxtor software and copied another hard drive over to this one, and it didnt give me any errors or anything, but when i got back into win2k, it didnt show any of the stuff i had copied