I've had a number of problems with disk access while trying Fedora Core 2...

Setup:

P3-600 on Gigabyte BX2000+ mobo - 256meg RAM

Maxtor 40 gig drive, one partition fat32 (30 gig) bootable for Win98, rest devoted to Linux partitions

Maxtor 160 gig drive - 3 fat32 partitiions about 40g each, one ext3 partition for extra linux data

Several times, disk write errors, usually when copying large amounts of data - "fat32 filesystem panic", according to /var/log/messages , usually setting the filesystem to readonly when this happens. Sometimes it says "attempt to read beyond end of media" with the ext3 partition on the big drive. Situations usually require unmounting and corrections with fsck and/or Windows scandisk. Seems to be confined to the big drive.

Reverting to Red Hat 9 seems to cure these problems, though now I'm more tuned in to things and I may see things now that I didn't notice before.

Have tried various formatting/partitioning options - just using parted on the big drive led to conflicts in the fat32 table (not enough entries in fat for number of clusters). Using a Maxtor utility to make the fat32 partitions made them look better to fsck, then made the ext3 partition with mkfs...

Hints? (I know - dedicate a machine to Linux - maybe later)

Download maxblast from the maxtor website and run through their diagnostic package on both hard disks.

Yes, MaxBlast 3 is what I was using to format/partition the drive for Win. Will look for diagnostics on the disk...