> 9atom boots fine so I think I owe Erik another beer :) > > Just for completeness, the system is an oldish amd - nforce2 > motherboard, SIL3112 SATA with a couple of 300g ST3300831AS disks.
take a look on segate's site for a firmware update for those drives. i'm not saying that's your problem, but older AS drives (consumer) have had firmware problems. i'll just beat a dead horse here and repeat that it is very important to choose a high-quality disk drive, and fewer platters leads to better reliability. (fewer heads to crash.) here are the spec sheet numbers i think are important unrecoverable read errors < 1 in 1e15 mtbf > 750000 hrs (1% afr) duty cycle 100% unload cycles > 200000 mostly enterprise drives fit this definition. - erik
