It's Seagate Hard Disk - ST3123A (102MB) .. and it's still stable and don't have any bad sectors (i'm 100% sure).

Well .. this is the problem when i boot IPCop floppy boot disk :
kernel: hda: drive not ready for command
hda: status error: status=0x01 { Error }
hda: status error: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }

I have tried FreeSCO before .. and i didn't have any problems .. everything worked fine .. but i needed dynamic shaper .. so i tried installing linux distro with a newer kernel than the freesco one.

It seems that the kernel is the problem.
Freesco 3.4 is using about 2.0.40 kernel (if i'm not wrong)
And IPCop is using a newer kernel.(2.4.x)

could be a filesystem problem, the new kernel doesn't have support for the filesystem used on the old kernel

Well .. the FS was UMSDOS (if i'm not wrong)
But decided not to use this HDD so i plugged 2 WDC Caviar 1170 (170MB) .. and it seems that the kerlnel don't have any problems with them .. and they are formated at FAT16 too(like the Seagate).

Re-compile the kernel with multimode. It should be in the IDE section if you run make menuconfig.

thanks , but this a standard kernel compilation of a installation disk of IPCop.

BTW. I've managed to install on the WDC HDDs Zipslack .. and the PC is now a low-traffic router+shaper