I'm using Vista Home Premium on an Acer Aspire laptop, and recently I lost
access to half my hard drive. I rang my manufacturers support line, and they
told me how to create a new vloume using disk management. However, when i
double click it, it says it needs to be formatted. After waiting a long time
(twice!) for the volume to format, it reaches 100% completion and then an
error message apears saying 'Windows cannot complete the format'. This
happens when i try Quick Format too. Upon clicking OK, i get a further
message saying 'Check to see that the disk and drive are connected properly,
and make sure the disk is not read only'. The disk is certainly not read
only, so can anyone suggest where i go from here?
I can see the drive in MyComputer etc. but cannot open or explore it. In
Properties, it says the volume is 0 bytes big! And it should be 50GB.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Spug