Hi all, to recap I had added a second hard disk to my 8.2 machine (as Master on IDE1), but fdisk could not open it. The hard disk in question was a Maxtor Diamond Plus 9, 80GB. When I fdisked it: fdisk /dev/hdc unable to open /dev/hdc. Thanks to Mr. Oakley and his suggestion of using; hwinfo --disk I could see that the system knew that there was a disk on /dev/hdc, but it was lacking any information about the disk geometry - and so could not access it. Next checked the BIOS (after looking up the correct geometry for my disk on the web), and found that the BIOS was autodetecting it as the correct model but with the wrong geometry. Even manually entering the sectors, heads etc. did not help - as the correct geometry result in the hard disk reporting the disk size as tiny (less than 100MB if I remember correctly). However the motherboard manufacturers website mentions that this particular motherboard (Soltek 75KAV) has problems when an 80GB disk is added to a Win98 system. Re-install to fix. So I did, and 8.2 recognised straight away on re-installation. Why it should do so now when it couldn't before I am not sure, but I suppose it a combination of the motherboard and BIOS reporting the hard disk geometry incorrectly to the OS. Not sure. Perhaps someone else has the answer. Thanks to all those who offered advice, Cheers Al