(clug-talk) Support - HDD Problems

[Cameron Nikitiuk]

Hi All,   Hope someone can shed some inisght onto this one for me.   Fiance and I were trying to install Mandrake 9.0 on a HD.  The old one that I tried using at the InstallFest seemed to be crapping out when it came to creating/formatting the partitions.  Thinking it could be the drive (around 4 GB so pretty old) and maybe developing bad sectors, Chris Wallace gracious gave me a newer drive (6.4 GB) to try.  Tried again with Mandrake 9.0...nothing...tried erasing hard disk and going with an auto allocate.  Again nothing...same type of error.  Error formatting hda1.    So...decision was made to go back to windows, thinking it could be a problem with the install routine.  Pulled out pqmagic to destroy old partitions and tried to do that.  Seems that it is giving me error 701 in pqmagic.  So...tried one last thing.  FDISK...tried creating partitions there and when it was trying to test system integrity, it kept starting and stopping.   Am I correct in assuming that it could be down to a faulty IDE controller on the mobo?  Or am I missing something here?  System is an old 200 Mhz with 96 MB of RAM, so maybe mobo is starting to flake out.  It seems odd that 2 drives from different manufacturers would both have bad sectors and both crap out in the same place.   Any help would be appreciated.   Cameron