So first take a look through advanced settings in CMOS setup for anything that looks like bootblock protection or virus protection as that will stop any changes being written to the bootblock which might be holding things up.... unless you're not seeing anything at all in Fdisk then we've got a different problem.

SparrowRat wrote on 2024-02-16, 03:32:

Hi, […]
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Hi,

Just got a old 486 PC. The clock battery was soldered (uggh) so I soldered in a CR2032 holder and got the clock working. No matter what I try, I can't get fdisk to format the drive. I set up the drive in the bios, have tried LBA on off, 32 bit addressing on off, have tried 4 different drives. I tried WIPEDISK program, fdisk, fdisk /mbr. I'm out of ideas. Any ideas from anyone here?

Thanks,
SparrowRat

What drives are you using? Are you able to auto detect the drives from the BIOS or are you manually entering the geometry?

Thanks to everyone for your ideas, it turns out I had to turn LBA adressing off and had the IDE cable plugged it upside down 😀