This is just a follow-up as to what I did to get Vista/WinXP to load onto
this Samsung hdd.

Initial problem was I could not load any operating system on this drive but
it tests fine, has been partitioned and formatted under WinXP Pro and Vista.
I can use the drive as storage - works great. Drive was made a Basic
drive - never dynamic. Whether the drive was installed by itself or with
others, I could not load an operating system to it, nor Ghost an image and
have it boot.

Many things were tried and always the same result - blank screen, blinking
cursor as though the MBR had been wiped. Talked to Samsung tech support and
they had me run some more tests and I told them it passes their Hutil.exe
program and that I even ran a low-level format on it - no failures on any of
the tests and the configuration was correct. Lot's of head scratching by
all but they finally said - we'll swap it out, go get an RMA. Ok, I do that
but I want to try one more thing before I box this up and ship it back.

Since one of the techs asked if I tried loading an old operating system like
Win95 or 98SE it got me to thinking about something is different with the
MBR and that I have seen this problem before. So I grabbed my old Win98
Boot disk floppy which has the old FDISK on it and booted up. Went into
FDISK and deleted everything - then made a new partition.

Put my WinXP Pro CD in and booted to it to start an install of WinXP (didn't
work before). Much to my surprise - it now works.

While I'm writing this from my laptop, the other system is now in the
process of doing an image restore over the network of an old backup image.
When I tried this before - it failed. I'll let you know in about 45 min if
it works or not and then I will try doing clean installs of Vista and see
what bubbles to the top.

Now should anyone be thinking I'm running old hardware - nope. New last
year Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe mb with all new WDC Raptor drives etc. - no
legacy cards. Vista loads fine on all the other drives I've tried both
3Gb/1.5Gb transfer rate drives.

Now - where I had seen this before was on a drive that had been partitioned
with the software that comes with drives that overlays it own partition
geometry. I can't think of the name of it but I know it's a real pain to
get rid of it and that partitioning a drive from within Windows does not get
rid of it - but the old FDISK does overwrite it. And that is what I think
happened in this case, even though I never used the "factory provided"
partitioning program, it cam from the factory that way. No amount of me
using Vista or in XP's partitioning or formatting capabilities will get rid
of it. As I recall (now) you needed their program to undue the partitioning
if you didn't have the old version of FDISK.

Well, my memory may not have all the details correct but I can definitely
say that using a Win98 version of FDISK partitioned the drive so that now I
can do a WinXP install. Will test a Vista load shortly.

Maybe this will help someone else since there's been some problems by others
about not being able to load Vista on to a SATA drive.

Any questions and I'll try to answer them for you,

Bob S.