[CS-FSLUG] HD Formatting problems

[Brian Derr]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 20:50 +0000, warm38 at juno.com wrote:
> Greetings, All!
> 
> I recently had a motherboard die suddenly.  I was reading my KMail
> under SuSE 10.0 and suddenly it was as though the plug had been
> pulled.  I replaced the PowerSupply and no change.  Oops.  I replaced
> the motherboard and put an unused WD 40GB HD (I didnt want to step on
> all the other stuff I had in the original HD) in the case.  I started
> it up and tried several ways to format it and install SOME operating
> system.  Nothing worked -- either they would not format the HD (XP,
> SuSE), or only do a small portion (W98), or they would not load onto
> the HD (XP, W98 -- SuSE never got that far).  I finally tried Xandros
> 3 and it worked just fine with no changes and no problems.  Huh?
> 
> Any ideas why nothing wanted to work with the drive?  I could get
> PartitionMagic7 to make a 40GB formatted partition for Fat32 or NTFS,
> but when I tried to load the OS, nothing. 
> 
> Ideas?  Until then, I'm Xandros on my Linux box.

Is this 40GB drive known to work?  You've double checked the jumpers on
the drive?  You're either not using a cable select cable or you have the
drive jumpered for cable select?  What does BIOS show for the drive?
I'm assuming you can boot from CD: what does the partition program (ie,
cfdisk) show for a hard drive?  Can it partition it, if yes, does it
fail on the format?

Answers man, I need answers!!!  :-)

Brian