Sounds like you need to whip out the nasties and pull a real number on your hard drive. In other words, you need to use a little program called Clear Partition on it. Filename clrpart.com, size 3105 bytes. When run it completely wipes the partition sector on your hard drive leaving it cleaner than a mere fdisk and format ever will. Sometimes this procedure is necessary to get windows to install, especially NT (and in extension win2k since it's really NT5) since it's very picky about the hardware. The reason for this is that when HD manufacturerse test their drives "garbage" is sometimes left since the drive isn't always wiped succesfully after the test. I always use clrpart.com when I want to wipe a system totally clean these days. Be very careful with it though for once used there is no turning back. Ever. So backup anything you want to keep before you use it. And remember, if you have segmented your drive into several logical drives they will all dissapear forever and everything that is on them. Once run you should be able to use fdisk and then format without any problems what so ever. I never had any anyway. I do not know where this program can be found Online but if you can't find it I'll mail it to you.
A final warning:
Be very careful in it's use since it's irreversible and all data on the harddrive it is used will be lost forever. Fortunately the program asks for confirmation three times if memory serves me correctly. Just make sure you pick the right HD when running it if you have more than one installed and only want to lobotomize one of them.
