Well, I think I'll try brute force and ignorance first.

I have downloaded an old version of Power Defrag (version 2, runs with 9x) and will run it tonight when computer not needed for work.

If that doesn't work then I'll pop the 149gig drive into my XP machine as a slave and use the 25gig slave that is in there for soemthing else - it hardly matters where on the network the slave is, so long as I remember where it is! I might use it on my W95 msachine that I only keep running to cock a snook at Microsnot.

I could of course pop the bog drive into the XP machineas a slave, format it there, and put it back where I want it.

I've got an old Partition Magic that I usually use for shuffling partitions other than when I get new blank drives and have to remember how to fdisk.

I'm planning to plop a couple of big hard drives as slaves into different parts of the network. A friend has given me an old Dell PowerEdge server (running, with XP, and restore disk, but processor only 400Mhz) and it looks as if I might be able to stuff LOADS of hard drives into it (I think it is designed to take 5 as well as the one with the OS on) to use it simply as remote storage. But I might have to take my first steps into the dark mysteries of SATA rather than IDE.