Matthew wrote:
Good day,
Think its a hardware issue with a new drive, when going t the BIOS and selecting Auto, instead of this switching to User and displaying all the relevant information it remains on Auto and the column over in grey just says the capacity. Only thing visible and selectable is 32 bit mode. On reboot the BIOS halts with an error, command failure primary master on occasion. If I try to install, yast hangs for a long time and on one of the screens you can see bad blocks and dma timeouts being produced. Never seen this with a drive before and wanted to see if everyone thinks its a broken drive...First time I have ever had this.
Many thanks,
Matt
If I remember correctly, Linux does the LBA or the figuring out of the hard drive geometry not the BIOS. The other thing is that hard drive controllers can get confused (UDMA/100 controllers looking at UDMA/66 drives with the different off-spec cables and then think they can go high-speed using the wrong cable). Check your IDE cable (it may have broken even with normal pulling out), put the proper staple in the right place on the rear of the drive (M/S/CableSelect), and it may just be easier for you if you have or can borrow an USB drive enclosure to try it if you need to test the drive. I use a extra USB2 drive enclosure (I have 1.8 / 2"/3 1/2 and 5 1/4")and put suspect drives in there. If there is a power supply problem in your box, then you will see the drive come up properly. If there is a drive problem, it will reproduce itself using the USB2/SCSI drive subsystem. Most enclosure kits are going down in price and you should think about using USB2 and getting the drives out of that hot enclosure. Heat is enemy number one with electronics. I use laptops almost exclusively so I get away from power supplies problems that way. Let us all know what you end up doing. Adam in NYC