MooseMuffin

Well, I've decided that my system just flat out hates this drive/this drive is messed up. So, until I come across another hard drive, my linux venture (does this even count as a linux venture?) will come to a close. Thanks to everyone for your help, I'll be back some day with attempt 2 and a new set of problems to dump on you.

Ugg, its not even that old. Its an samsung drive that transfers at ata66 speed, which requires an 80 conductor cable. Is there anything that isnt wrong with my computer? gah

Based on the previous suggestion of clearing up hardware issues before software issues, tell me what you think of this. I got a new 80 conductor ide cable to replace the 40 conductor one, and hopefully getting the drive running in dma mode and perhaps clearing up a problem or two. When attached to the new cable, the bios wont detect the hard drive... If use the same cable to attach a cd drive, it works fine, so its not the cable. And when I reattached the 40 conductor cable, the drive was detected again, so its not the drive either... So they both work, but not combined. I wasnt aware it was possible for a drive to be incompatable with a ide cable.

digby: Yes my bios is updated to the latest. That other suggestion sounds good, I'll give that a try when I get back from work. gowator: I mean that I can boot knoppix with the raid array, I can see my drive, but cant read it. Says something about not being able to mount such and such. That information and driver will likely be helpful once I get mandrake running, but I'm not trying to install to that drive anyway so I dont really mind if its not detected during installation. The raid drives are ntfs anyway, so I'm not sure if i care that they're detected at all actually. When I get back from work I'll be armed with a proper cable and these two suggestions. Hopefully progress will be made. Thanks.

Im not sure what you mean by where but I have 2 disks attached to the raid card. They have my windows xp installation and if I ever get this working, they will also have a small little boot partition. The 10gb drive is attached directly to my motherboard (no raid) as primary master. I can format it to whatever I like by using partition magic within windows, mandrake hangs if I let it try to format it. I have a good amount of info on my system setup already in this thread. If theres any other info that you think may be helpful, just ask. Thanks again.

I have knoppix but it wont boot, it freezes at searching for partitions. Im nearly positive the problem is not my raid card because I can boot knoppix with the raid installed, just not with this new drive...but Ive confirmed that the new drive works... Regardless, I should be able to get a new ata cable today that will get the drive out of pio mode and at least fix the dma time outs, maybe that will get me going.

console? root password? These sound like linux commands/terms, I dont have a working linux... Sorry if I'm being stupid.

That sounds like a pretty good suggestion. Unfortunately, I just may be too much of a linux noob to make any use of it =( 2 issues: Nvidia doesnt have a mandrake 10 driver on their website. Should I use the 9.2 one or do I have to do something complicated? Where/how do I install these drivers? I cant install it in linux, since I dont have it running yet, and installing it in windows sure doesnt make sense. BTW, thanks for all your help Ixthusdan

Motherboard: Asus A7N8X Raid Card: Promise fastrack 100 tx2 2x Maxtor 740X drives attached to it Primary master: Samsung SpinPoint sv1022 (this is connected with a ata33 cable and thus runs in pio mode, this is my suspected culprit at the moment.) Primary slave: none Secondary master: plextor 40/12/40a Secondary slave: toshiba 16x dvd no serial devices and just a logitech mx700 for usb devices. The only thing that stands out is the drive and its transfer mode. Mandrake gives me some dma complaints about that drive during its device detection stage so I'm picking up a ata66/100 cable soon and hoping that will straighten it out.

Fair enough. Then let me ask you this: I would think, and very possibly incorrectly, that changing hardware settings and drivers in windows will only affect the hardware in windows, and not help get linux installed. So where can I mess around with hardware settings? The bios doesnt offer much except letting me put in the cylindar, sector ect stuff manually.

I recently got my hands on this old 10gb hard drive and I figured that this would be a good opportunity to learn linux. My machine runs windows XP on a raid 0 array using a promise pci card. I installed this new drive and have now been having all kinds of trouble. I spent a good 6 hours yesterday trying to get xp to boot while the new drive was plugged in, which I eventually narrowed down to some nvidia software ide driver. Then, the mandrake install would seem to stop every time at the formatting step. By stop, I mean that I could still move the mouse at all, but it didn't seem to have done anything for about 45 minutes. I ended up formatting it using partition magic and picking to use existing partition during the install. I get to the screen where I can choose packages, but then when I hit next, nothing happens for 7-10 minutes and then a screen with a progess bar comes up but it doesn't install anything or move beyond this screen (I left it here and went to bed and 9 hours later, it hadn't moved). I thought that the hard drive may be dead so I went back to partition magic, made it a fat32 drive, and copied some music and movies to it. It was slow, but successful and everything played back alright, so I don't think thats it. My iso images all passed the md5 test, and my plextor burner has never given me a bad burn. Any suggestions? I've never tried linux before and I'm thinking this may be a hopeless project.