Installed XP on the second HDD. It's a cursed system really. Anyways, it booted up when I meant to hit down and choose 98se instead, and then I CAD'd so I wouldn't have to deal with it.

So then the computer boots, SCSI attempts to detect the drive XP is on (both of these things are old. 33MB/s and 3.2gb). It takes a bit... still waiting... and then it starts spamming the screen with spam (and thus a failure to boot).

Any chance for this HDD? Nothing important on it, but I'm going to miss that spare 3 gigabytes.

I doubt that this is a hard drive problem. Probably something just got corrupted. Since there's nothing important on it, try formatting (and maybe reinstalling XP).

Originally Posted by Link

I doubt that this is a hard drive problem. Probably something just got corrupted. Since there's nothing important on it, try formatting (and maybe reinstalling XP).

Get screwed over by XP again?

Yeah... the problem is though when the system goes through the check for devices, SCSI tries to detect it, and then it hangs with garbage. Should I chance leaving it run and trying to detect and then boot up?

Mmm, new problem. Hard drive's connected and all, but now just wont' be accessed by the system, recognized correctly yes, but it won't show up in explorer/knoppix or Fdisk..

So you managed to get it past the garbage screen on detection? What turned out to be the problem?

Fdisk should be able to see the drive, even if there are no partitions. But I do think the Windows fdisk is a bit awful. Have you tried fdisk in Linux?

I know you'll hate me saying this, but Windows XP is good at recognizing drives. A drive will show up in Explorer even if it isn't partitioned, and you can format it right in Windows.

Originally Posted by Link

So you managed to get it past the garbage screen on detection? What turned out to be the problem?

Fdisk should be able to see the drive, even if there are no partitions. But I do think the Windows fdisk is a bit awful. Have you tried fdisk in Linux?

I know you'll hate me saying this, but Windows XP is good at recognizing drives. A drive will show up in Explorer even if it isn't partitioned, and you can format it right in Windows.

Suprising yeah, I'm guessing it just overheated or something. After a while Fdisk saw the drive, and Fdisk in Linux is... foreign to me. Couldn't get it to work, but it was a slackware edition so...

It works anyways, and XP is VERY wonderful at cleaning up your drives ;D. You're right though, after a while though it formatted.

EDIT: How do I create a linux partition for installing slackware?

I've never used Slackware before, so I don't know exactly what you should do. Most automated Linux installers include partition\filesystem creation, but I don't know if Slackware has one.

For making Linux partitions in Linux though, general instructions are sort of like this:

# fdisk /dev/sda

(Change depending on which drive you want. 1st SCSI drive is /dev/sda, 2nd is /dev/sdb, etc. Same for IDE drives but they use h instead: /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, etc.)

In fdisk, make your partitions. You'll generally want a boot partition (100MB), a swap partition (1GB+), and a main partition (whatever space is left). Set the boot and main partitions to type 0x83 and the swap partition to 0x82. Make the boot partition bootable. After fdisk, restart the computer.

You'll need to create the filesystems after this, but the instructions for this should really be in the Slackware installation manual. Actually, I would read the manual and make partitions the way they say instead of listening to me.

If you've never used Linux before, Slackware may not be the best distribution for you (I recommend RedHat for beginners, though Gentoo is fairly good and I can help you with it since it's what I use). Captain Spam uses Slackware, so you could ask him if you have specific questions about it.

Using Mandrake, easiest I heard, but Gentoo sounds good (from everybody's opinion). Thanks Link.