06/23/03 Hello All, from The Other
Last week was very frustrating. The slave Maxtor drive went back to PC Peripherals (this was an OEM drive), so I decided to continue the dual-boot Win95B and Mandrake 9.1 system on the remaining master Western Digital drive. Total disaster. Linux wouldn't install from the Boxed CDs. Bash, kernel, and up to 30 different packages wouldn't install. Never would boot up. I think the problem was I had HDD S.M.A.R.T. Capability turned on in my BIOS. The Maxtor was a 30GB drive made this year. The Western Digital drive was probably made in 1998 when I did the last hardware upgrades. I don't think the Western Digital drive is HDD S.M.A.R.T Capable. Eventually (after 5 days I finally went back to Ontrack's Disk Manager and MS-Dos 5.0 to get the Western Digital to format in FAT16) I was able to install Win95B and Windows NT 4.0. I then reformatted and got NT 4.0 running and am using it now. My guess is that Win95B and NT 4.0 have never heard about HDD S.M.A.R.T Capability, and didn't try to write to the Western Digital using it. Whereas Mandrake 9.1 is new and sophisticated enough to know about HDD S.M.A.R.T. Capability and was using it to write to a drive that didn't support it. Hence all the problems with Linux files on the Western Digital. Anyone know different? The Other (Who now has to learn the Windows Messaging system to communicate with you. Your sympathies please. On a brighter note, NT 4.0 does recognize the SB Live! Value card in all its capabilities. Now I can use my Roland MIDI modules without going through the Winman 4x4/s card, for which I never found Linux drivers.)
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