would anyone have knowledge of older hard drives not working with Linux? I have a Maxtor 8.4 g drive dated 1998 and Mandrake 8.2 will not load onto it, setup freezes. I cannot find anything on Maxtors site about issues with Linux. I have reformated the drive with DOS and it should be okay. Any help is appreciated.

If you think it's the hard drive causing the errors, you might want to perform a surface scan, with a bootdisk. It's unlikely, in my opinion, that the hard drive is causing the freezing, it is most likely some incompatible/failing hardware.

...there are some bad sectors on the disk. On the same machine I have an 80gig drive. When the older drive is not installed, Mandrake will load onto the 80 gig. If the 8.4 gig is installed, Mandrake will not load onto either drive. I wanted to load Linux on the older drive and leave Windows on the larger drive along with some windows programs. I thought Linux would work on the smaller drive as windows worked just fine on it.