I had previosly installrd SUSE Linux 8.1 Professional on to my Aptiva system. This system had 2 hard drives, the first an 8Mb drive and the second a 13Mb drive. SUSE Linux successfully installed onto the second drive.
I have now replaced the 8Mb drive with a 40Mb Western Digital ATA Disk.
When I now try to install SUSE th following occurs :-
DVD is inserted into drive and system booted up from this drive successfully.
Installation proceeds and the following message appears :-
hda: WDC WD40 0BB-00DKA0, ATA Disk Drive
Subsequently the following message appears :-
Partition check
hda:

Then the system hangs! There are no further messages, and no sign of any I/O to the DVD or hard drives.

Any suggestions as to what is happening?

Are there already any partitions on the 40GB disk?

Yes, there are 3 primary partitions, two FAT and 1 FAT32. There are also two logical FAT32 partitions and 1 logical EXT3 partition.