I amtrying toinstall 1.4_rc4 off the install cd,I think I have now ruined 3 HD's.
The machine is a Gateway 500S. With an intel 865G chipset. Original 1 HD 40G Maxtor Fireball 3, I added another WD400BB 40gdrive as slave. When the drive is new it will boot it up fine, I infact installed all of 1.4 all the way through the install using hdb1 as a /home onlydrive. Install went fine, but upon booting the first time the machine hangs. It will not boot again with the WD drive? No matter what I try the WD will not allow the machine to boot. I can boot into mynew gentoo system fine as long as I leave the WD drive unplugged. So I tried another out of the box. It boots the CD fine and ran fdisk /dev/hdb and partitioned it as hdb1 and made an ext3 out of it. I even mounted it and wrote to it using the CDbooted system. As soon as I boot again I'm back to the same problem. It will not boot with the WD drive. Anyone have any suggestions??
My first thought would be a motherboard issue. My 2nd thought would be an issue with WD drives. WD has a drive testing program called Data LifeGuard. Take a look around on their website <http://support.wdc.com/download/> and see if you can find it. Most likely, it will be a boot disk you can use to diagnose the drive and see if there is any problems with it. I recently had an issue with a very similar model WD drive. It would intermittently not get detected by the BIOS. Even if I set it manually in the BIOS, the BIOS would not boot from it. The odd thing is, if I booted with a Linux CD, the kernel detected the drive and was able to use it just fine. This particular drive demonstrated this behavior on 2 different motherboards. Eventually, the BIOS wouldn't detect it at all, but the kernel still could. I ended up mirroring the drive to another 40Gb from a rescue CD, and I sent it in for warrantied replacement.
-- Andrew Gaffney
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