OMG!! I'm with you pal! I had a maxtor, by the way, and it worked for 3 years than suddendly began to do a rythmic "tic" and after a couples of week it was not working more... I had to install on another PC with win 2000 who regognized it, and repaired the damaged cluster. My old HD had 2 partitions one for OS + programs and one for all the stuff. Fortunately the damaged cluster was in the OS partition so data were saved. After the cluster correction by win 2000 i reformatted the partition and than, after a couples of months, I changed the HD. hope it helps. vasq (feeling you pain)