Maxtor or WD?

[Keith G. Robertson-Turner]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I bought a Maxtor 160GB 8MB cache IDE hard drive that Fedora Core 5 
> would not install to. I've replaced it with an identical Western 
> Digital unit, and it's installing now. What would cause this

I've had Maxtor drives before that were fine, in fact I don't think I've
ever had a bad one, but I don't think that generally they are up to the
quality of WD. IIRC they do run quite hot, so if you don't have adequate
case cooling there might be a problem.

Sometimes, however, the problem lies with the very strange ways that
Windows handles hard drives geometries (or not, as may be the case).

In exactly the same way that having a certain Linux installed partition
layout on a disk can cause Windows to be unable to install, similarly
having a Windows installed partition layout on a disk can sometimes
cause Linux to refuse to install. You'd be surprised how often the
following fixes install related problems:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

For the boot block, or:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

For the whole disk.

But if you're sure that the disk has never had Windows on it before,
then maybe you were just unlucky, and got a "Monday Morning" disk.

-- 
K.
http://slated.org - Slated, Rated & Blogged

Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.16-1.2122_FC5
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