I like maxblast 3 i got it when i bought my maxtor hardrive you can download it here. http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/dow.../maxblast3.htm
It will work on other hardrives also. i've used it on western digital, seagate and samsung. It also has an option to zero out your drive.

Thank you for your advice, but I now the problem is the hard drive, I run for example fdisk, and it says that no fixed drives detected, I am starting to think that the hard drive has problems, and that I messed it up with the partitions, etc... Some one can help?

Try the program i posted above and let me know how you like it.

Hi, well It didn't recognize my seagate ATA V 60gb Hard Drive. Anyway do you know if I can erase all my partitions or erase completly my hard drive from rescue mode? Thank you =)

If you suspect a problem with your hard drive then you want to run the hard drive check utility offered by the manufactuerer of your hard drive. As Mojojo mentions some or all of the check functions may work for other drives as well.
If your drive really cannot be detected then connections and jumper settings need to be checked. If the utility finds bad sectors that is, well.... bad. How many?
What is the history of the PC. Were you able to boot up the computer into an operating system before your Linux install attempts? If you choose to partition the drive yourself during a Linux install, what does it show about your installed hard drive? Does it locate a drive? Does it show that it is partitioned?
Just some thoughts.

thank you for your interest, I actually was trying to install in text mode the RH 8.0, but when I was defining partitions it stopped and the screen was all messed up and I see this line:

Installation exited abnormally....
killing processes....
You may now safely reboot the system

Any idea?

The install program did say that it saw your hard drive?

Hi, Well, the system detects the Hard drive, but the installation doesn't detect any linux partition nor root and when choosing the partitions on RH and starts the setup process that's when it stops. What should I do?

i would consider trying to get a slackware live cd or knoppix-these will boot from your cdrom(your pc must be set todo so from your bios). then you can(on slack), login as root and type cfdisk /dev/hda; that will show you the existing partition table-you can then delete which partitions you want and create new ones(a swap one also). then when you install use those partitions for /, swap, and whatever, depending on how you want to set up- i make my partitions primary(as i do only 4-/ ,swap, /home, /tmp) and make the appropriate one bootable(/ in my case). with knoppix you will open a terminal and do cfdisk /dev/hda and go from there. if cfdisk does its job, you should be able to then restart everything, this time booting from your installation cd. i think i might try putting on redhat first, as i have run into a similar hang with mandrake myself, although it went fine on the second try. if cfdisk can't do it, it may at least tell you why and that will be progress. i don't know if this is help, but keep at it, you'll get there(you might even come on up and stick with slack, who knows). good luck.

p.s.-had to edit this; the command is cfdisk, not cfsck. don't know where my mind was, sorry.

I have seen a similar issue.... it was bad memory.

I know it sounds crazy... but I got "invalid media" errors and all sorts of other indicators pointing to problems with CD's and what not. I tried harddrive installs... FTP installs.... even tried putting Win2K on it for a test.. nothing would complete installation without error.

Eventually, I started swapping hardware components with another system... and the problem followed the memory.
I was able to verify this with this script:

http://people.redhat.com/dledford/memtest.html

My old memory failed.. my new memory didn't. Bought a new bunch of RAM and have not had any issues since.

-KevinJ

I can't see it being anything to do with memory but i could be wrong. Segate is known for having blocks on the hardrive to go bad. If you have an old windows boot disk or you can download one. Try running scandisk and see if you have any bad blocks on your hardrive. http://www.seagate.com/support/index.html
here is your hardrive support page you can download a floppy to help you clean up your hardive. And if you buy a new hardrive i would suggest a maxtor mine's been around for awhile.

well... I certainly didn't see that it had to do anything with memory either, especially since I was getting all these "Invalid media errors" during install... which you usually get from bad CD's.. but believe me.. it was memory in my case.

I am not saying that it definitely is in his case... but mine is an example of when traditional error messages and troubleshooting were not suffcient to identify the problem. If he has exhausted the usual methods.... he can give it a try.

BTW... the redhat installer is more than capable of detecting bad blocks and dealing with them. Don't forget... he is working in a RAMDISK while installing. Even if the system has harddrive issues... it shouldn't lock up and die. But if he has a memory problem... it very well could.

-KevinJ