When trying to explain partioning, Fdisk, and formatting, I like to put it like this: imagine that your hard disk is a roll of blank paper.
Disk partitioning, which is what the FDisk command does, is like cutting a piece of paper off the roll. It's still blank but you now know how big it is and what its physical dimmensions are. Partitioning writes a small block of information to the drive that tells other software how big it is, how to divide it up, and what sort of file system can be written to it.
Formatting is like putting ruled lines onto the paper - it structures the drive so that information can be written or read from it in an organized way.
The format command will NEVER work if you have not already partitioned the drive, because it needs that partitioning information to be there first.
Unfortuately, if your Fdisk command is telling you there is no hard drive present, you have some sort of problem. These are things you can try:
I am assuming that you are using an IDE type of drive rather than a SCSI hrad drive. Go into your computers BIOS. On most systems you do this by pushing the DELETE key just after it is turned on (just after text appears on screen). Somewhere in the BIOS you will a way to "Auto detect" IDE drives. It will scan for IDE devices. If it finds a drive, thenexit the BIOS making sure to "save settings".
Your Fdisk command should then work.
If the autodetect does not find a drive, your drive is either:
jumpered incorrectly,
not plugged into power,
not correctly plugged into the IDE controller (on the computer motherboard),
or is defective.
Hope this info helps - RW.