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different brands of hard drivesIs it okay to use different brands of hard drives on the same IDE cable? I have a Maxtor 40GB, ATA/100, 5400 rpm drive set as master and I need to use a Western Digital 40GB, ATA/100, 5400 rpm drive as the slave drive. Is that safe to do or will it blow out something in one of the drives or something on my mobo? Thankx for your help. Bookmark/Search this post with: 
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different brands of hard
There should be no problems; Microsoft don't have a say in how drives are manufactured.
yes, I agree with pinniped
I have been building computers for years, my first hard drive was a 10meg. Oh my.
Manufacturer is not important.
It will not damage your mobo or drives.
Good luck
Rich D.
different brands of hard drives
Thankx very much for your answers pinniped and sinczar. I keep reading at other forms that people seem to have a lot of problems with Maxtor drives but not with Western Digital drives so I'm going to change to WD.
I have another question. I bought a used 60GB Maxtor, DiamondMax 16, 7200rpm, ATA/133 drive, Mfg. Date: 17JAN 2003, and I can't use all of the drive. My mobo was made in 2000 and has an ATA/100 IDE controller and the BIOS was made in 1999 and I've never updated it.
I can't install Debian because Debian can't format this drive. I tried installing Mandriva 2008 i586 and it did format the entire drive. I did a complete install of Mandriva including updates. I rebooted and everything was fine with booting into KDE. I copied 4.5 gigs of data files onto this drive and rebooted and Mandriva spit out stuff like this
Buffer I/O error dev hda, sector 19003128
ide: failed opcode was: unknown: end-request I/O error dev hda , sector 19003238
So being the tenacious type I did a complete install of OpenSusE v10.3, i386. The same things happened in the same order.
So, Is it the old BIOS or the ATA/100 IDE controler on my mobo causing this? If I used a hard drive with ATA/100 made in 2003, 7200rpm, would it work with my mobo? It's driving me nuts that I have a perfectly good used 60GB drive but I can't get it to work. The drive I've been using is a 40GB Maxtor, ATA/100, 5400rpm, made in 2001 and I'm using an Athlon 1.2GHz cpu.
different brands of hard drives
The formatting and I/O problem can be a combination of things. The problem with access to the entire drive is due to the BIOS lying to the operating system. You should be able to boot from a Live CD and format without problems. However, booting may still be a problem because it is the BIOS that loads the second stage bootloader and the initial Linux file image. So if the BIOS is too stupid, it can't load Linux. The solution to this problem is to create a small partition (1GB is enough to hold multiple kernels etc.) This partition will be mounted at the "/boot" directory of your final system and it will contain the initrd images, config files, Grub configuration, and a few other things.
The small partition MUST be at the "start" of the drive so that the bad BIOS can access it. When you perform the install, you need to tell the installer to mount this partition as "/boot".
Another trick that may become necessary is to look at the "hard disk addressing scheme" used when formatting the HD; you may have to tell the formatting tool to use a particular type of addressing scheme. There is the ancient head/track/sector scheme, then a "linear block array" scheme and variations of that. A BIOS from 1999 may understand the "LBA" scheme even if it gets confused with large numbers, but I remember many BIOSes even in 2000 could still only understand head/track/sector.
Good luck!
different brands of hard drives
Okay, if I understand what your saying, when the drive was made has nothing to do with the problem.
The hard drive could be made in 2008 but if it's an ATA/133 instead of an ATA/100 then I'd still have the problem because of the old BIOS and not because my mobo IDE controller is ATA/100?
I know so little about hard drives.
different brands of hard drives
The HD should drop to the speed supported by the bus during negotiations if the drive was built to standards (unfortunately that can't be guaranteed either). However, odds are the problems you are having are all related to an ancient BIOS. There may be other hidden problems as well; use 'google' to help you find comments about installing Linux on that model of machine that you have.
different brands of hard drives
Thankx for all the help pinniped. I really appreciate it. I can't google the model though. I built this one myself. Most of what you've said so far is Greek to me and I wouldn't know how to do what your talking about.
May be I should just get one of those shiny new spiffy socket AM2 motherboards. I've heard tell those are so fast they make the Bugatti Veyron look like it's standing still.
different brands of hard drives
Have you tried using google with "linux" and the model of your MoBo to see if anyone has written instructions before?
I would need to dig up old articles and read the 'fdisk' manual again before I can give you specific instructions; maybe I'll have time tonight.
different brands of hard drives
Thankx pinniped but I don't want you to go to a lot of trouble. I'll buy an old, used 40GB drive at ebay. When I buy a new mobo I'll have 3 drives I can use with it. I could put the 60GB in an external case and make it a USB drive. Or can I? I've never been able to use my 3 ½ USB floppy drive with Debian and none of the other free linux distros I've tried know how to set it up and format a floppy. I need to get a book about linux me thinks. Thankx again for all your help pinniped.