I had a new system (asus P6T deluxe mb, Intel i7 940, 2 seagate
barracuda 500gb HDs in RAID 0, 3g DDR3 ram) where at least one HD and
the MB died. Unfortunately, I read after-the-fact that the seagate HDs
I got were prone to fail. I ordered another mobo (gigabyte), but when
I tried to reformat the remaining HD I'd get a BIOS error 'missing
operating system,' with the Vista DVD in the drive and set as primary
boot. Some research pointed to a corrupted MBR.

So I ordered another seagate 1T HD and Vista re-installed fine.
However when I tried to reformat the remaining 500g HD it got right to
the end and said 'cannot format.' When I opened computer management
\storage\disk management in control panel the HD is displayed as:
simple, basic, RAW and status as 'healthy (Active, Primary
Partition).' Is the drive savable? Thx.

Problem solved! I went to computer (right-click)\computer management
\storage\disk management and created a simple volume.