Cannot FDISK 80gig HDD

I have a problem with a new system that I am building.

It is my first 'built from scratch' system and I'm suprised that I only have 1 problem with it.

I bought a brand new 80gig hard drive online. I installed it in my new system, set it as master, slipped in a Win 98 bootdisk and booted the system. At the boot screen I saw the normal "Detecting IDE drives..." and it detected everything just like it should: CD-RW, DVD-ROM, and hard drive. Goes to the next screen... "Verifying DMI pool..blah blah" says what the detected IDE drives were and then continues to load from the bootdisk in the A drive.

I get the A: prompt and try to perform FDISK I get the large disk support screen... choose YES then it goes back to A prompt with "Error reading fixed disk".

I sent the hard drive back thinking it was a bad drive and I just received my replacement about 2 hours ago and I tried the system again and got the same result. I've tried a Win98 SE CD, Win98 bootdisk, WinXP Pro disk and my old gateway system restoration CD to try to fdisk and install an OS on the thing and nothing works.

I've tried researching the problem using google and I'm not finding anything. This computer should have been built and functioning a month and a half ago and I'm getting extremely aggravated.

I appreciate any response.

How old is the motherboard you're trying to put it on? Some had limitations (well, that was back in the 2-8GB limit days). Check the motherboard/bios vender websites for updates. If you have another system to put the drive in, swaptronics solves most problems.

If you have only one hard drive, make sure the jumper is in the neutral postion (across Master and Slave). If you have the jumper in Master position, then you will get an error with FDISK, plus it takes forever to boot up.

Some BIOS' even as early as 1999 have a 32 GB limit. You can either flash the BIOS, use an emulation program (available from the drive manufacturer) or set the jumpers on the drive to "limited" (also available from the manufactures web site).

What brand of drive is it?

The first step is to make sure the drive is seen by the bios. When you boot up and you get the bios summary screen hit your pause key. Is the hard drive listed? Does it show the correct size? If not review your cable/ drive configuration and what hd sizes the bios supports.

I have not had it matter if set to master, slave or standalone configuration but this is dependent on your ide cable, drive and bios.

If this is OK I would set the bios to boot the xp cd [set boot order to boot the cd 1st in the bios] and use the install to partition/format and install.

If you still have problems go to the drive's web site and download their utilities. These include test software and partitioning/formatting tools.

It all comes down to the hardware working first which from your error indicates to me that it is not.