Hi, how do you have this drive set up? I'm going to assume its set up as follows
- the jumper on the drive is set to Slave, and the jumper on the boot drive is set to Master with slave (important if it is a Western Digital drive), (if these drives are on a IDE controller card, the jumpers can be set as Master as long as they are on different channels.)
- If they are on an IDE cable, be sure they are connected to the correct connectors on the cable, looking at the cable, the connector with the blue end is connected to the motherboard ( or the one at the bottom of the Y shape cable). The connector with the black (I think) connector is attached to the Master drive (Or the connector that looks like its at the top of the cable). The connector with the grey end (I think) is attached to the Slave drive. Again if your using a controller card you'll need two cables and only use the motherboard and master drive connectors on the cables.
- If all of the above checks out, and your still having this problem, there may be a program running on that drive, or a file be used be a program running on your boot drive. Try going into Windows Explorer and just delete everything on the drive, by doing doing this you may find out whats hanging you up. and then change it.
- Use a Windows 98 boot disk to boot, and then use FDISK to format the drive, this will format it in FAT32, and will remove anything holding you up to. After you do this reboot into your OS and then try formatting your drive, at this point you should have no trouble formatting your drive.
Hope this helps, and sorry about any misapelled words
Jim