Maxtor or WD?

[Dotan Cohen]

On 15/06/06, Keith G. Robertson-Turner
<fedora-gmane.00002 at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.
>

I doubt that the disk had ever had anything on it. But the install on
the WD unit has finished, and all seems well, so I'll take that for
what it's worth. I can't fnd a link to a list of Fedora-compatable
hard drives.

Dotan Cohen
http://auto-car.info
743