Thanks for the help. This is kind of my one-night-a-week project, so it's taken me a while to get back to it.

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IDE bios settings.. make sure it's not fixed set to the wrong drive size, or auto-detecting the wrong drive geometry.. (LBA? whatever)

Sees it fine, shows up as the master drive on the first IDE chanel.

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Is there anything on the IDE chain that could be causing issues. CD-ROM set to slave, but master doesn't like having slave drives without a "single->master" jumper

Nope. It's the only thing on the chain. The CD drive is on the third IDE chanel by itself.

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FSCK! did you try badblocks? badblocks with RW test? fsck -cc?
Not yet.

So on reading this I decided to try another hard drive. Which worked perfectly. Unfortunatly, I want to use the 30GB drive as the system drive, and use the 250GB drives in the raid array.

So, I tried zeroing out the drive, and trying again. Got bored, so I didn't give it time to finish, but gave it a good lone while. Same problem. I'm running badblocks destructively now.

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What brand of IDE drive is this?

Western Digital. 30GB. Bought it from circuit city years ago, it's been in quite a few systems but I've never had a problem with it.

I'll report back when badblocks finishes. If I don't have any luck I'll probably bin the drive and find a different small one if that'll solve the problem.

Matthew