OK... having finally got my drive spinning up properly again (little bit of stiction it seems)... I ran through the procedure again and success.... well nearly Now recognised correctly by the BIOS, I hooked it up as a slave and powered up. I've been using Win2K on an old 20GB HDD in the short-term, which came up fine but recognised the drive as only 128GB "Healthy" with a 128GB partition but unformatted (it's a 500GB drive). So I set the EnableLargeLba registry flag and rebooted. Again the BIOS sees it fine, but Win2K does not see the drive at all. So removed the reg key and rebooted... and Win2K still does not see the drive at all now. So in slight despair I hooked up the drive as the only drive (it should be bootable)... the BIOS sees it, POST passes fine then I just get a black screen with a white cursor in the top left. Is it time to get a liveCD version of TestDisk and see what that makes of it? edit - update Sooo.. I grabbed the Frenzy ISO, burnt it and booted up from that. The boot up sequence messages are very informative... basically the drive is not responding in a timely manner to transfer mode, read cache and write cache parameter requests so it gets ignored in the end. Needless to say TestDisk could not see the drive. Next step is to redo the whole sequence again to reset things (as that is what made the drive appear to W2K for 1 boot) and boot straight to Frenzy and try to use TestDisk. Fingers crossed but I'm not hopeful - still I'm learning some stuff along the way