From: "Geo." 

"You Can"  wrote in message
news:MPG.183edbed6aa23d9f9896a7{at}news.barkto.com...

> My bad.  I meant using PQ to partition and format the drive removing MS
> from the equation. ...doesn't disk manager affect some bits (byte) in
> the MBR/partition table?

Worth a try but not sure if that will help as creating a partition is not
the problem since I can create a 120mb partition just fine using XP. it
when I go over 128gb (I think because it's something less than 136gb) that
it throws the format error.

I got a program from IBM to low level format the drives and recreate the
boot sectors (and test them). You boot a dos disk and run it and from DOS
it was able to test the WHOLE drive. So I know my bios is good, and I know
the drive is good, and it appears the problem is a bug in XP.

so my next test is going to be to remove all the drives from the machine
except for the 185g drive and see if I can install W2K to it in a 20g
primary partition then do the patch and see if I can create a partition to
use the rest of the drive.

Geo.

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