Yes, I did mean to yell in the Subject line. The problem, other than the failed drive, turned out to be a red faced forehead slapper. I forgot to change the jumper on the primary master after I removed the failed primary slave. At 11:38 AM 5/29/2005, you wrote:

It figures this would happen during a holiday weekend.

I have had a failure on my linux machine, a 2400MHz Athlon XP with a KD7A Socket 462 motherboard and GB of RAM.

When I booted the machine I got a clicking noise, as it turned out from the secondary master drive, and eventually a hard drive failure notice. I physically disconnected, both ribbon cable and power, and rebooted the machine.

This time there was no clicking noise, but the machine took a long time detecting the IDE drives. After three or four minutes the IDE drives; primary master, secondary master and CD were found, but once again the machine took three or four minutes for the next boot step, verifying the IDE pool data. The boot then went past the boot from CD, the CD is selected as the primary boot device, and then hung where it was supposed to boot from the primary master boot.

I next booted from the SuSE 9.3 number one diskette, without any problems, except for a long wait while detecting IDE drives, but when I selected the option to boot from the hard drive I got the message "Boot Disk Failure, insert system disk and press enter.: As I don't have a system disk at that point I quit.

Two other things - I went into the cmos and autodetected the primary master drive. This took about a minute to run, but the process found the hard drive. In comparison the same process for the primary secondary drive only took a couple of seconds. Lastly, I changed the cmos to have the machine boot from the hare drive. This eventually resulted in the boot disk failure message.

The primary master is a 120GB Western Digital that's only about six weeks old. I hope that's the problem, although it means reinstalling linux and all of my computational chemistry software.

I have changed cables with no success. I also ran the SuSE repair process on distribution CD number one. It found several errors, some in grub, fixed them and reported the system to be ok.

Speculations from hardware individuals are requested.

Thanks in advance.