Maxtor drive

[Matthew Carpenter]

begin  "dep" <dep at linuxandmain.com>
(Sun, 21 Jul 2002 08:14:38 -0400)

> begin  Keith Antoine's  quote:
> 
<snip>
> an update on my sister's system. she took the maxtor back and got a 
> western digital. and again the suse 8.0 install halted at the point 
> where it was probing the hard drive. there followed lots of checking 
> -- dos's fdisk saw and identified the drive, and worked, after which 
> she deleted the partitions it had made -- and all her hardware is 
> listed as working with linux. there were various things suggested all 
> over the place, but most were not practical, in that she had no other 
> working machine there.
> 
> she having blown a rare day off on this, she got a little angry with 
> me for having suggested linux.
> 
> yesterday, she put windows on it, and everything works fine. and so 
> now i will get phone calls from her whenever the thing gets infected. 
> but the "too bad you're not running linux" response will no longer be 
> available.

I'm sure she wouldn't listen anyway.  She chose SuSE 8.0 long after your article describing what a PITA it's installer can be.  I'm betting there's some issue with the MB and the SuSE Installer.  It is too common still, however, that something doesn't work right with Linux installs.  And with the distros' viability continuing to wane, I wonder if that will ever change.  
Caldera doesn't install on some of the older Cyrix stuff, but I've found Caldera to install a lot better than most.  It's a shame, too.  I'm sure she would have learned to like it.  It is a shame, however, that we live in a world chocked full of the instant gratifiers, not just your sister.  
Besides, it helps to have someone literally hold your hand the first time you install an OS, I'm sure her familiarity with Windows didn't come without it's price.  There are tons of stories, especially when Win95 came out, of even newer machines not installing Winders.  Most of them required BIOS upgrades, some just the normal settings.  I really do wonder what it was, though.