Hard Drive: Serious Concern
 

I recently bought a new 40gig Toshiba HD for a Dell Inspiron 8000 I aquired. Among other things the hard disk needed replacing, thus the purchase. The drive itself is 5400rpm and has a 16mB buffer, pretty nice.

I proceeded to install WinXP on half of it and Mandrake 10.0 Official on on the other half. All good there. Here's the issue: When I shut down in WinXP the system quietly shuts down with no real noise from the HD. In Mandrake when shutting down, from either X-windows or terminal the harddrive makes a loud "Wheee" sound just as the power is cut, as if the HD had no prior idea the system was shutting down.

What's more is occasionally when turning the sytem back on I get the error "No primary drive found". (Or to that effect, I did not write it down.) Once I restart the machine everything works fine...

So, what to do? Any ideas? I can make this notebook purely Windows, but would rather rack up as much time as possible in linux for experience.

Thanks,
Jeff

*Edit*
I should mention when shutting down, it does unmount sucessfully from what I can tell.

It sounds like your machine is simply vocalizing its objections to you shutting down Linux. More seriously, what specific messages are displayed, and exactly what conditions will produce them? -- J.W.

There are no error messeges given, when shutting down everything checks out okay. I could copy and paste that, but I don't believe it would be much help.

The conditions that produce the problem are simply anytime I halt the machine it occurs. Be it from terminal or GUI. Yet, no problems with XP.:scratch:

Shameless bump.

I've been working on this to no avail for 5 hours. I'm not throwing the towel in yet, but dang this is frustrating.