@zmeta THIS. WORKED

I bought an MDM rasp pi 3b starter kit. Its my second pi (first is a version 2) and I have imaged and installed the first one a number of times. A month ago I played with noobs on it and decided to get a second pi and use the noobs to get a KODI box installed for another tv.

The pi came with debian on an SDHC card (the sd card adapter even had a cute Raspberry logo) but when I used the most recent SDformater (v5... v4 is no longer available) the all important "size adjustment on/off" option is no longer there... so it didnt wipe all the partitiions properly and I was getting the resize error many on this thread mentioned.

I tried the ridgecrop guiformatter, I tried combinations of sdformatter/guiformater etc. I loaded the mini tool partition magic software and played with all sorts of configurations, deleting, creating one or multiple, formatting everything fat32, different block counts etc and all ended up the same. None of the windows 10 partition/formatting tools were working. It's possible I could have found a proper mix in the partition tool that would have eventually worked or that finding a new driver for the Kingston USB-SD card reader hardware I have resolved it... but going back to good old command line diskpart did the trick. Once I had gone through the diskpart stuff (steps 1-11) I grabbed my NOOBS_v2_4_3 zip, extracted and copied it onto the SD... and it booted like a charm.

I suspect that the diskpart is blowing the partition away and when it creates the FAT32 its using the right blocks etc and a different driver setting for the USB that makes it happy for what the PI is looking for. I havent popped the SD back in to view it through partition magic but expect I would notice something different in the settings than I had selected before.

Thanks ZMETA... saved me a late night (only spent a few hours... would have been much longer I expect).