I'm running slackware
2.4.26
and tried 2.6.9
I'm not so sure that its a hard drive problem, because I returned the first one because I thought it was malfunctioning but it probably was not. I use a floppy to boot slackware on my second hdd set to slave which is a maxtor 80gb. When I have the 200gb seagate connected and I try to boot the 2.4.26 kernel it gets a kernel panic and fails to continue to boot. When I tried my 2.6.9 kernel it trys to boot, but about halfway through, it disables irq 14 (which is my ide controller) and then trys to continue booting, then disables the irq again and again.
When I have the the seagate unplugged it will boot fine, although sometimes it does hang on boot. I can boot with a cd such as damn small linux.
Anytime its connected it will make a small beeping noise. Not like post beeps, they're smaller and have a shorter duration. When I boot into dsl every move I make is followed by a tiny beep or a click.
I havent yet tried to install windows on the 200gb, which is what I was planning on doing, because I dont want to be unable to access linux normally although maybe writing lilo to the boot sector of the new hdd would help that.

"I can boot with a cd such as damn small linux."

Try booting to CD and then accessing the Seagate drive from damn small Linux. If you can partition the drive, format the partitions, etc from damn small Linux then the problem may be isolated only to booting from the Seagate. In that case you could try switching your two drives and make the Seagate the slave.

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Steve Stites

I forgot ... I already tried accessing the drive in dsl. It seems that whenever both are plugged in, neither are detected in bios most of the time, while sometimes only one is.
fdisk /dev/hda
says its not a valid block device.

bump

What is the model number of the Seagate drive?
Are the jumpers configured correctly on the drive?
Post hardware details on this PC.