Thanks rusty, OErjan. I've tried both your suggestions, unfortunately without success. rusty, when I did the "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda", there was a couple of times that the hdd made that ominous clickng noise. OErjan, after doing "mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -c -j -m 1 /dev/hda1&&e2fsck -cfkpv /dev/hda1", I did successfully mount the hdd, although it took a long time. After rebooting though, it was again unmountable. Seems to be recognised, just not accessable. I would be strongly tempted to just buy a new drive, if it wasn't for the time I swapped out the drive and no problems were solved. Still different problems, a while ago now. I'll probably stick with the current situation (knoppix 4.0.2, doing work on a flash-card) rather than fork out cash and not solve the problem. One last request -- if either of you can think of a way someone with a knack for getting things wrong could have attempted to faithfully follow your instructions yet still mess it up, it would be great if you'd let me know. Basically, this is exactly what I did, in order:

"fdisk /dev/hda" => "o" (dos partition) => "w" write.
"fdisk /dev/hda" => "n" (add new partition) => "p" (primary) => "1" => defaults for begin and end => "w" (write)
"mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -c -j -m 1 /dev/hda1&&e2fsck -cfkpv /dev/hda1"

Cheers,
Rob.