Advice needed re: hard drive not working

Hello! I'm trying to teach myself how to build my own computer after mine died on me. I had installed a new hard drive (maxtor, 30GB) on an old motherboard (ASUS P2L97). Obviously this was not a good idea. I will buy a new MB, memory, etc.. but would like to salvage this HD if possible.

Installing this HD as a slave, with a master running Redhat 8.0 tells me that "unable to open /dev/hdd- unrecognized disk label" and "The OS thinks the geometry on /dev/hdd is 4092/16/63. Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 503.999 M".

Can anyone advise me on what to do? I don't mind losing the data on this HD. Is there a way to erase what's on there and start anew? If I simply plug it into a new MB, would this solve the problem, magically?

Thanks!

The new motherboard wouldn't fix anything, did you format it in rh yet? When you buy a new hard drive it must be formatted.

When I bought this one, a friend installed RH on it for me. I assume he formatted it. I hope he did. Can I re-format it? Would updating the BIOS help? The ASUS site is not entirely clear on how to do this, though.

I am a bit confused, I thought you installed the slave, and had redhat installed on the master?

Sorry, sometimes it's hard to explain in text. I normally wave my hands around to illustrate what I mean

When my HD stopped responding, I took it out and installed in into an equally old machine. In that machine, I have a HD running Redhat. So, the kaput HD I turned into a slave so that I could use the functioning HD to see what was the matter.

So. Both HD's have Redhat installed on them, but the bigger one is the one that has an "unrecognized disk label" and screwed up geometry.

My preferred method for fixing this type of thing is probably worse for the harddrive then anything you'd come up with. But when my 120 Starts making weird noises, I'll rap the frop of my case with my hand, hopefully hittting the reset button, but if not hit it continually until I do hit the reset.

Then my computer normally works fine, occasionally it wont goto POST but I just reset a few more times, or unplug it let it sit and plug it back in till it works.

And yes, this is really what I do.

However it seems like your harddrive is damaged beyond repair. :-/

*laughing* okay, that's some interesting advice, and if worse comes to worse, I will try it. Thanks again for your help. That sort of thing has actually worked for me in the past as well.

Oh man, u dont wanna know I I fix my comp...... (KICK!)