[CS-FSLUG] HD Formatting problems

[Frank Bax]

At 03:50 PM 1/13/06, warm38 at juno.com wrote:
>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.


Are jumpers set correctly?  Does BIOS recognise drive properly?
Are you using a 40-wire cable with drive/mb that wants 80?

You say "Nothing worked", but did any of those attempts produce an error 
message that might be a clue to what's wrong?