u prob have boot-sector virus-protection enabled in ur BIOS, and as formatting or re-installing windows writes to the boot-sector of a drive, u get this warning message telling u it's virus-like activity. it isn't. u get the same message if u have an off-the shelf virus package on ur pc. as it's drive D: which is presumably a secondary slaved hdd, then u should just allow the activity and see what happens! it'll be perfectly safe.

if the drive is patitioned then u can format it in several ways. in W98 u can right click and choose format (full) or u can use an ms-dos prompt, ch dir to c:\windows\command and use format from there, or make a dos bootdisk in control panel and boot the pc from that. btw if u do use a bootdisk u can use fdisk to check the status of ur partition. and the format syntax is format d: /c /v:11characterlabelhere, presuming u still want it to be drive D: the /c switch checks the drive for bad sectors the /v: switch lets u pre-label the drive, for example I label all my drives Disk1_Vol1, Disk1_Vol2, Disk2_Vol1, Disk2_Vol2 etc.

hope that hayulps u, kimk, if u get stuck u can always e-mail me.