Hi Glenn, Glad you bought this up. In the early days of DOS, the maximum size of a hard drive partition was limited to 2GB. The size of each smallest file cluster was 16KB. This was the old FAT16 (File Allocation Table) file system. Win95 OSR2, changed all that. Now you could have hard drive partitions upto 2 TB (Terrabytes) in size and you could change the smallest file cluster size to be 32KB. This is the new FAT32 file system. When you try to run FDISK on a Win98 system, it asks you specifically whether you want to enable "Large disk support" aka FAT32 file system. If you answer yes, then after you run FORMAT, you get a FAT32 file system. If you answer no, then upon FORMAT you get a FAT16 system with a limit of a 2GB partition. Most older programs are happier to work under a FAT16 formatted hard drive. My best guess is, the i30 expects to see a standard MSDOS, FAT16 formatted hard drive. If you get a used hard drive larger than 2GB, chances are it may be formatted as a single partition under FAT32. This may create problems. Just to be safe, go to Fry's Electronics and purchase a Laptop to Desktop hard drive converter kit. Mount the 2.5" laptop hard drive in a free hard drive bay on your desktop computer as a "slave" drive and using a older version of MSDOS like 6.2 run FDISK (disabling large file support) followed by FORMAT. The i30 cannot format a hard drive. It could only read/write files if it could read the first 999MB of an already formatted drive. This is my guess. I may be wrong. Hope others could add some insight. Tapas. Armand, If the hard drive is formatted with a FAT32 system, you would have to convert that to a FAT16 system before installing it on your i30. It is a very simple procedure. Just run FDISK from the DOS prompt and reply "no" when it asks you if you want "large drive support". Then run FORMAT from the DOS prompt. You will get a FAT16 hard drive. You can always ask the seller to format it with FAT16. Good luck, Tapas. Hello Djan, A "notebook hard drive" is the same as a "laptop hard drive". Most notebook hard drives, besides fitting into a 2.5" bay, are also very thin. They may be less than 1/2" thick and may be called "Slim" or "super slim". Your only concern should be: 1. 2.5" width 2. 1084MB or more capacity 3. Compatible with notebook/laptop computers. Tapas.