Well I went to computer management but windows did not prompt me to initialize the disk. Clicked around on the toolbar options and did not find any "format disk" options either. The only choice I had was to "create a partition". With nothing to lose at this point I chose to create a partition and lo and behold, it assigned a drive letter and formatted the disk. When the process was over (quite a while with a 1TB disk) I have a fully functioning hard drive. Now I still cannot get my optical drive to work, I installed the software that came on the disk and updated from the Asus website, but still no joy. The drive spins when I put in a disk, LED's flash but nothing happens. Could it be a bad drive at this point? Thanks again for the help with the hard drive, that is what is so great about the online community and forums! Keith.