I installed Suse 9.1 on a blank FAT32 formatted hard drive and now if I try to boot my system, it freezes. If I plug in my other hard drive with WinXP on it, it loads fine. If I put in both hard drives, it still freezes.

I tried booting from my Windows cd and it wouldnt work. The primary boot device is my cd drive, then hard drive and if I have the secondary hard drive plugged in to the system at all, i cant get pass the bios loading screen. it wont boot up at all. without the second hard drive plugged in, i can boot to windows normally without any problems. and when i only have the second hard drive plugged in as the master, it wont boot up either. Any Suggestions?

Does the drive spin up at all? When you plug in the second drive on it's own, is it set to Master?
Are the harddrive parameters for Drive 0 (Master disk on first IDE channel) correct for the attached drive?

Just a thought, but have you tried booting a rescue disk, the Suse installation disk in rescue mode, Knoppix or somesuch ? There is still a faint chance they might work, even if the Windows cd doesn't boot. (I have had some interesting things happen with the bios when running Suse, so you're not the first

Cheers,

mj

the drive does spin but freezes the computer as soon as it does. it is set on CS or Master when its the only drive plugged in. And I dont know about the parameters. how do i check?

And i will try to boot with the SUSE disk, but i think i tried that already.

yeah, cant boot to SUSE cd either.

You can check the harddrive parameters in your mainboard's BIOS, and i'd try to avoid using CS, most computers don't even have CS capable IDE cables to use it correctly. (Although in very rare cases, CS is required to have two drives on one cable. usually, one drive will be a few years older than the other in this case.)

i didnt see anything about the harddrive parameters in the bios. i cant check the parameters of the bad drive anyways because as soon as i plug it in, it freezes the computer. also, i played with the jumper setting to see if it made a difference and i didnt, thats the reason i tried CS, I usually have my two drives set up master/slave.

Are you certain your jumper settings are correct? It really sounds like you've got both set to Master. Good luck with it. -- J.W.

nah, master/slave

#1 Tried it with just that harddrive alone, no other drives attached?;
#2 Tried it with just that harddrive on IDE channel 0 as master, and a CD-ROM drive on IDE channel 1 as master?;
#3 Tried replacing the IDE cable and run through #1 and #2 again?

If all else fails, tried updating BIOS yet if possible?

The last thing I can think of is, either the drive has hung it's cylinders out to dry or BIOS has settings that conflict with the C/H/S characteristics of the drive (C/H/S: Cylinders, Heads, Sectors per track. When set incorrectly, BIOS will either complain about hdd controller/drive faillure, or freeze completely on some mainboards.)

Were your hd's stacked on top of each other and not spaced with the ventalation holes covered? Just a wild idea.

lol, yes, my hard drives are stacked properly.

I have tries only using the one drive, however i didnt try a different ide cable or using my cd dirve and hard drive on the same ide. that gives me hope... im gunna try that.

tried everything except bios update... for some reason i kept getting error messages when i tried to update.

last resort.... Taking a magnet to it would probably ruin the hard drive, right? I guess I could try it because the hard drive is useless at this point. i could use it as a paper weight either way.

I'd try the disk in a different computer before i'd do that, for all you know it could be your own computer that's messing up at some point.. making you ruin a good disk for nothing.