I am having some very unusual problems. I have an 80 GB diamond HD. I have an installation Windows XP SP2 running on it. I would like to install linux on this system as well or stand alone. Every distro and every type of installation fails at the format stage and when i restart my HD has disappeared. I have to turn all power to the system and do a power drain by pushing the power button until all power in the system is gone. My HD magically reappears after this process. Is this some sort of internal protection in the HD? Any ideas out there? I've worked with many systems but I have never seen this. Oh, Windows XP installs and runs fine. So do win 98SE and 2000. Please help I'm going crazy trying to figure this out!

You need to supply more info. What do you mean your HD disappears then reappears? Where are you seeing this? Are you modifying the BIOS as required?

It diappears in the bios. The drive itself seems to be shut down during the attempted format when installing a linux distro. When I restart after a failed install the drive is not recognized by the pc.

That sounds like a hardware problem. ?