🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, The good old PC does it again.  Just when you think the world is
logical it throws a wet fish in your grandmother's wheelbarrow.

For the information of the people who kindly replied to my posting, yes, I
did use /S in format commands, and no, I didn't fdisk the drive as it was
already readable - it was more likely to do with the CMOS settings so I
didn't want to muck about too much with the drive.

In the end I managed to discover the CMOS settings of an identical laptop.
Despite what all the official Seagate statistics for this drive say (and 
yes, I did quote the number correctly: ST9051A) the thing is set as;

Cylinders: 977
Heads    : 5
Sectors  : 17
Landing  : 977
Pre_comp : 300

I should have guessed all along, as should all the people who replied.
Isn't it obvious now you can see it? Me neither.

Oh well, time to return the laptop and get back to a computer with a proper
operating system and no mucking about with CMOS and memory settings and IRQ
conflicts and Windows Graphical Machine-Hanging Environment.

Huge thanks anyway for everyone who has offered help on this problem, who
are too numerous to reply to individually.

-- 
Ashley Powell