I lent my son a laptop and now it doesn't work.
I've taken the hitachi 500gb hard drive out and attached it to my desktop pc and the few times it shows in disk management,it has the windows partition as Raw instead of NTFS.
I'm not worried about losing data off it, but would like to format it to NTFS and try a fresh instal.
Any suggestions as windows suggests formatting but can't do it.
Otherwise may need to buy a new smaller size hard drive

When you "Format" Drive your telling it how you want the file system to be made on that drive.

So you can choose Fat32 or NTFS larger drives choose NTFS +32gb

If windows can not do it that means it may have lost the MBR Master Boot Record which reports back the partitions on the drive so you may have to run a program called FDISK to repair / remove and create a new MBR.

If your laptop is running vista just put the drive back into the laptop and use your Vista installation disks to re-install it, it should resolve all the problems as the install process begins.

Hope that helps.

* Repairing the MBR at the installation (Not always given that option) Could bring the Hard Drive back to what it was.

If your stuck derek give me a call and i will try and advise you.