Hello, I'm looking for a second or maybe third opinion (maybe more). I had my 80 GB hard drive with Win98SE, Slack Linux 10.1 and RH Linux 9.0 installed and functioning. I added a DVD-Burner (making my CD-ROM drive secondary slave to this drive where before it had been secondary master). The BIOS detected everything, but the OSes wouldn't boot properly. Windows gave an error message stating that it needed to be restarted. Slack would boot but not run X and then freeze on shutdown. RH would freeze during boot-up. So I decided to alter my drive setup to see if I could avoid having to reinstall these OSes. During this process, something happened to the hard drive and now it won't boot at all. I've tried Linux boot CD's and they all report kernel panics. I can boot with a Win98 boot disk, but when I run fdisk and try to view the partition table, there is no partition table to view. Here's my question? Is my sneaking suspiscion that this drive is dead accurate? It's detected in the BIOS. I have another PC and I've downloaded a utility from Western Digital, so I could hook it up to the other PC to see what happens. I did have to replace the EIDE cable this drive was connected to, as the drive was not registering in the BIOS. Could this be a related problem? Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks. whitshade "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." -Lewis Carroll

Have a floppy and the hard drive connected and run killdisk: http://www.killdisk.com

I'm not familiar with ALL the OSes you are running but Win98SE uses the DOS parameters for drive letter assignment. Depending on how the 80GB is partitioned the optical drives may or may not displace other drive letter assignments. If the drive is partitioned using a Primary and then an Extended partition with multiple logical drives any additional drives added to the system will back up the drive letter assignments for all the logical drives. As I stated I am not familiar with all the OSes but have read that because of the way Linux utilizes drive space care must be taken or there can be overlap. Not sure if that is your issue or not. Did you unplug the computer and exercise static precautions before opening the case? Ifnot, you could have caused damage in that way. Fdisk may not be able to view Non-DOS partitions.

Thank you both for replying. Santa, killdisk is pretty cool. It provided some useful information on the drive. I could see that there was some unallocated space on the drive. I could also see view data on the drive. Much of it was gibberish, although I recognized LILO and there were a lot of letters in upper and lower case, from A-Z, possibly Linux packages. OtheHill, I was fairly careful when I partitioned this drive. There are (were?) a few unallocated clusters, but nothing overlapped. Windows fdisk used to list the Linux partitions as non-DOS. I tried to be careful about static. Maybe I missed something. I think the DVD drive caused a sharing conflict, because one of my failed attempts to install Linux reported the CD drive and DVD burner were sharing an IRQ, so I've disconnected it. I put in a 20 GB hard drive (I was once using this for backup, but in my infinite wisdom (lol) had installed Fedora Core 2.0 on this drive so there goes my backup) and Fedora failed to boot. I have tried Slackware 10.1, Red Hat 8.0 and Fedora Core 2.0 and all have failed to install because of a kernel panic. I'm wondering if the drive controller (or mobo?) hasn't gone bad. I did have to replace the primary cable. Has this happened to anyone? I have an identical mobo I can use. This is just crazy. Two days ago this PC was fine and now it's *&!@#-ed. whitshade "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." -Lewis Carroll

IDE channels use a total of TWO IRQs. If you had both optical drives on the same channel they would be sharing. No way to avoid that.

Thanks, O. I checked my 80 GB hard drive in a healthy PC. I disconnected the primary master hard drive in the healthy PC and installed the 80 GB drive in its place. The 80 GB drive shows up after POST, so the system sees it, but nothing happens. It doesn't boot or anything. The good news is the healthy PC booted right up when its original hard drive was reconnected. The bad news is I think my 80 GB, 1.2 years-old hard drive is now a paper weight. Thanks again. whitshade "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." -Lewis Carroll

Connect the 80GB as a slave. If your OS is messed up you aren't going to boot with it. I don't think you grasp the concept here. Kind of like saying your engine in your car is no good when all that is wrong is the car is out of gas.