**Caution: The following will wipe all partitions and data from the
drive**

If you don't have anything on the drive, boot up with a knoppix cd and
do a command like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1G

where "/dev/hda" is the drive you want to test. dd will give you a
report of "records in" and "records out". I am sure you can probably
even do this with the Ubuntu installation media.

Steve Kozakoff
Anesthesiology Department
[log in to unmask]
Office: 265-8012
Desk: 265-0680 Ext. 85749
Cell: 494-9770

-----Original Message-----
...
Beyond anything else I should be asking, I am curious whether the
interface board could be sufficiently dated as to prevent a recent Linux
kernel from successfully talking to the on-drive controller of a new[er]
IDE drive. More specifically, if Linux says "it's time to format your
500GB drive" and that drive is indeed 500MB, then is it safe to assume
that Linux can write to the entire drive?

Bill




Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029