I am sort of new to linux. I use a lot of live CDs/USBs and I have installed a couple distros on previous computers.

I just build a new computer and transfered two previous hard drives to my new one with an additional new 300GB drive. I want to install Gentoo 2006.0 on my new hard drive but one of my older hard drives is giving me trouble.

here are my specs.
Intel Celeron D 3.33GHz
SATA 300GB HD (WinXP on one partition future "to be" Gentoo on another)
Two ATA 80GB HDs (2-3 years old)
1.5GB DDR Ram
DVD-Rom
Dual layer DVD-Burner

I installed Windows and it found errors on my two 80GB Hard Drives and it fixed them. After that, Gentoo wouldn't boot... it freezes at (Activating udev), I tried booting Slax (kernel 2.6x) on a CD and USB, they both freeze during boot.

I then formatted both 80G HDs and linux still wouldnt boot. I narrowed it down to just one 80G hard drive. I used the manufacturers disk tools to check the hard drive, and nothing was wrong with it.

I zeroed out the HD with the manufacturers tools and made it unallocated with no partitions at all... Linux boots fine, but when I format it with NTFS or FAT32, Linux freezes at boot. I have even tried letting linux format it. Linux freezes when partitioning to FAT32.

So when the HD is zeroed and unallocated, Linux boots but when it is formatted, Linux freezes at boot. I tried flashing my bios, enabling/disabling SMART hd access, noacpi, and windows has no problem with the hard drive.

Any Ideas on what I should try?

Thanks,
Matt

Try keeping all other drives out of the system until you've found the real culprit. You might also want to try a different IDE cable, preferably new to rule out old age/etc. to see if that solves anything. Also try the drive on different IDE channels.
The S.M.A.R.T. setting in your BIOS does nothing more than enable the drive's capability to detect and log it's own errors, it would be useful to have it enabled and check the drive after each test with the Smartmon tools (readily installed on Knoppix CD/DVD) and note the differences.
Also I don't know what brand your harddrives are, but Maxtor's PowerMax tools have several tests among which a test (The third test in it's menu if I remember correctly) that reads and interprets the S.M.A.R.T. data stored by your harddisk and puts out reccomendations based on that data. More than one test yields better results.
Check the power feed to the harddisk, perhaps try a different power unit.
Last but not least, check your RAM. as weird as it may sound, this can cause a whole range of problems when there is a fault in a RAM module. Memtest can help determine faults, you'll also find that on a Knoppix CD/DVD.

just to add to what you have said...
check all the system setups right down to the bios...and if you have more than one ram module then swap them and if its one, then try it in another slot...careful experimentation can yeild results...
and if the result is good but dont make sense, then welcome to computers...

Ok, I've been busy and out of town but I found out how to get gentoo to boot.

There was nothing wrong with the hard drive I dont think.
I got Slax 5.1.6 to boot with no options.

In Gentoo, I need "ide=nodma" to boot, and everything is fine. Will no DMA be bad for my processor over time? Is there a fix to get DMA working for IDE?

Thanks,
Matt

I think that will affect your drive performance more than anything. It will just make the data slower and should not affect hardware itself.

i am experiencing a problem. i tried to install RHL - 9 on my Compaq Presario PC and got a msg "No Hard Drives detected". However Windows is running on my PC and when i tried to install Ubuntu-Linux for Human Beings, it detected the presence of the hard drive and showed the existing partitions.

I tried to find the HDD driver thru windows but got nothing matching with the manually loadable drivers in RHL that r listed during installation.

the hard disk in my PC is a SATA one and its number is WDC- followed by some numbers.

plz,can anyone bail me out from this predicament?

You may want to read some of the install docs but I think it has a doscsi option that you have to type in somewhere. That tells it to look for SCSI drives.

Hope that helps.

ditch rh9, its old, download fedora

I had the same booting freeze problem as you, and using "ide=nodma" fixed it thank you very much

Except now it freezes at
"Hardware detection started ...
Detected 1 AMD athlon CPU"

I've had this computer for a while and the drives are fine. Ive checked their integrity with tools. I think gentoo just doesnt like my motherboard.

make sure your jumpers are set correctly