I had a hard drive that i wasn't able to do anything with via system restore disks, formatting (dos couldn't even detect it), or windows reinstallation....then i thought i may as well try my FC1 distro on it - it worked like a charm (so far)...should i be worried that the HD will fail on me? I'd hate to start installing all kinds of stuff only for that to happen. I'm hoping it was a HD config issue, not an actual hardware integrity issue...any thoughts from anyone who has had similar experiences??

can the BIOS detect it properly ?

Not sure. There's a chance that it was simply a software config problem. My conspiracy side says that MS reinstalls are overloading the "bad sector" part of your drive (a little part of each drive, that once filled up, won't work again) and somehow Linux alters/clears/rechecks that, because I've heard of this a couple other times, but I can't really be sure of it, because it's just what I've been told through friends of friends. Then again, it would be a nice feature to ensure "pirates" don't share MS's software.

Still, unless you figure out the real problem, I'd resign that drive to the "glorified swap drive" category. In other words, use it for anything but the information you need to keep. Maybe use it as a system disk (because you have the CDs), but keep your /home and other important stuff on a different drive.

sorry - rookie question....how can i tell if the bios can detect it? all i remember was that when i was originally trying to reload the system disks, it told me it wasn't FAT32 configd, or NTDS (sp?)...then the c prompt dissapeared alltogether....

FC1 disks go in, all hardware detected and it runs like a charm...

The bios: when u boot the system - it must show the name (model number) of the disk