Hard drive woes

[Kurt Kessler]

I have a 30GB Western Digital drive that does not want
to seem to format. I have tried to fdisk it several
times, to no avail. I finally have a bit of time, so I
just decided to try and install linux on it to kill
anything that may be on it, and perhaps fix this
problem. My bios (which is current) sees it half of
the time.. (yes, sometimes it do, and sometimes it do
not) I put in my RH 8 cd and booted, its going through
everything just fine, untill its time to
partition/format the drive. It tells me that it is an
"invalid file system" and asks if i want to retry or
abort. I clicked retry several times, then it says
"the disk is not initialized" and asks me if I would
like to initialize it. I click yes, and then get "An
error has occured, no valid decvices were found on
which to create new file systems. Please check your
hardware for the cause of this problem"

So what in the hell can I do to fix this??? I can only
boot into windoze if this drive is set as a slave, and
even then, I cannot read or write to the disk. Fdisk
will NOT view the drive. However, windows will show it
as having a 23GB partition and a WIN98 directory on
it. Im lost here... Any help will be GREATLY
appreciated.

Kurt

=====
32 bit extensions and a graphical
shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system
originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written
by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

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