New Hard Drive Setup Issues (Is there no hope? Should I take the hard drive back to the store and just use my second hard drive as the new master?)
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My hard drive crashed and so I got a replacement.

I set the BIOS settings to [AUTO] but I wonder if that was the smartest thing to do.

The size that it displayed seemed to be a little low. I am wondering if maybe I should have done something other than set the BIOS to automatic determine the settings for the new hard drive.

I suspect I did something wrong because when I have tried to install the Ubuntu Operating System it is stuck on 36 % when formating and/or configuring the hard drive.

How do I go about making the BIOS hard drive settings by hand?

I do think there is something screwy going on. I have two hard drives in the system. The old slave drive BIOS settings has this:

CHS CAPACITY 8422 MB
MAX LBA CAPACITY 120034 MB

The new master hard drive has this:

CHS CAPACITY 8422 MB
MAX LBA CAPACITY 8422 MB

I am wondering now is that maybe we have gone beyone what the old motherboard and BIOS cand handle for a the size of the hard drive. If so, maybe a partition is in order. What do you think?

The Hard Drive is a Western Digital PATA
320 GB
WD3200JBRTL
ULTRA DMA/100
8MB BUFFER 7200 RPM
if I do not get it running today, I think I will try using the old slave drive as the master drive.

The screen says, regarding the motherboard:

Award Medallion BIOS V6.0

COPYRIGHT (C) 1984-2001, Award Software, Inc.

ACPI BIOS Revision 1003. LV

Inter (R) Gleron (TM) 1200 MHz

Memory Test 261120K OK+ 1024 shared memory

and so on...

I think the motherboard cannot handle a 320 gig hard drive. Unless I can get some magic from you, I am going to take the new hard drive back to the store and swap out the old slave hard drive and make it the new master drive.

You've got the infamous 8.4 G limit. See http://oss.sgi.com/LDP/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

Bottom line, your BIOS can't deal with it, but any modern kernel can deal with it. I don't know why your Ubuntu format is stalling at 36%; you might want to give us the version you're using... and you might need to use fdisk manually to setup the drive. I *think* you use the "alternate" install disk for that, but I'm not a Ubuntu expert.

You might also check the manual of your drive and make sure there aren't any settings/jumpers for this situation. Setting your BIOS settings manually might help, if it's possible, and I suppose there might be a BIOS flash upgrade for your system, but that's another whole can of worms.

I haven't installed Ubuntu in a long time, but IIRC there is a way to get rid of the pretty background screen and actually see what is being installed.

You would learn a lot if you knew what the installer was doing when it hung, and you will get that information if you can see the console when the install is underway.

As for the drive limits, as you've been told, the Linux kernel should be able to deal with that.