Thanks in advance for any input: I have struggled with this annoyance for some time - thinking that it was either hardware or something I was doing wrong. But now with up to 40 machines all getting the same treatment, between 30 and 60 % will hang on initrd after I run mkinitrd. I have been using mostly Western Digital WD400VE (2.5" notebook drives with an adapter) but have also seen this occur with the WD400JB (the 3.5" variant). Since all the machines have the exact same build and I do the same thing to all of them, yet some of them work and some don't - I can't believe that I am making a fundamental mistake (and I don't believe I am). On the other hand, the numbers are way to high and consistent to be obviously hardware. My base system is a SuSE 9.3 distro (although I've seen it with 9.1 to some degree) in which I have included the opensource highpoint driver which has been compiled locally. The /boot is in the / partition which is formatted with reiserfs. I have the following modules listed in /etc/sysconfig/kernel for MKINITRD_MODULES: "reiserfs scsi_mod hptmv xfs". The most consistent fix we have found is the tedious process of tarring up "/" (from a rescue disk), copying it to another machine (usually at this stage the machines are unique enough, that we can't lose data), writing zeroes to the first few sectors with dd, re-partitioning the drive, copying the tarball back to the disk and untarring. This requires re-installing grub which sometimes produces a hang on loading stage1.5. We are going to go away from the 2.5" drive anyway, but for the meantime (and until we have time to re-work the existing ~200 machines), I have to deal with it - and I am concerned since I saw it on the 3.5" drives, anyway. Before I push this issue back to the disk manufacturer, has anyone seen this kind of behavior before, or can you offer me any insight into what may be causing this? Thank you very much, Patrick W. Freeman Systems Specialist DATAllegro