I have (had) a perfectly fine system running FC5 with a 160G SATA drive. For backup, I added a second SATA drive.

The drive was recognized so used fdisk to add a new partition. That was successful so I then tried to format it using mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb and I kept getting an error about an invalid block size parameter being passed.

Searching on Google there was a suggestion to reboot after partitioning so I did. Now my computer stops right after "checking NVM". It doesn't even make it to the FC5 screen to choose the kernel version. Eventually I uplugged the new drive and things boot OK again.

I thought maybe I'd get rid of the partition on the new drive and try again. Using the Rescue CD I was able to boot up with the new drive connected and delete the partition. I figured this would be similar to the drive just being out of the box. Nope -- system still doesn't boot if I plug the second SATA drive in.

I must be a real ditz today ... adding a second drive should be a "no brainer" one would think! Help ... I must be doing some really dumb here!

Thanks!
Darrell ...

The BIOS might be making the new HDD the boot HDD. Check wether you are booting the correct HDD.

Yup, that was it. The BIOS was replacing the floppy device (2nd in the boot list) with the added SATA drive. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

After I got this resolved, I did find one issue perhaps with either fdisk or mkfs and the SATA drive. It always complained about an "invalid block size parameter" being passed when I tried to format the partition. I tried qtparted instead and it worked fine.

Thanks much for the suggestion!