said by aurgathor:Start with the obvious. See Answers to Questions asked:
Did you remove the CD/DVD from the optical drive after install? - Yes
What are the relevant settings in the BIOS? All set to boot HD first and this is the only HD. Set to boot IDE first over Sata. There are no other devices other than the DVD/CD and the 160GB Seagate HD attached. Even tried booting into Windows without the Optical drive attached, there it will get to the Windows "Welcome" screen but either just keeps running there or it locks up depending on how the drive jumper is set.
Drive Jumper was set to CS, Master, and Slave to see if any would make a difference - result was no difference.
Did you explicitly mark the partition active? - Yes and that is confirmed viewing the drive in Computer Management tool in a different computer.
Do you have other partitions on that drive? - No.
Next time turn off all other boot devices, and see if the problem still repeats. That's already been done. See answer to question 2 above.
If yes, put that HD into another machine and get a smartctl log of it (i.e. "smartctl -x /dev/sdb" ) to see if there's anything wrong with the drive. - Not sure how to do that, don't know Linus or Linux, but I have viewed the drive in other Windows machines. It is marked as a Basic Active Partition.
Add'l info. - Erased the drive with Seagate's version of True Image with no problems doing so. But the drive would not erase with Seagate Drive Tools for DOS. Short Erase worked, but Long Erase failed.
Sometimes an error message shows error reading something like "00, 0" when running the seagate diagnostics. Seagate has a "short drive test" that the drive passes. Running Seagate's long drive test now.
Also burning Hiren's Boot CD now.
More later. Interim comments/suggestions/thoughts in mean time are still welcome and desired. It's a mystery.
One more thing. Seagate Drive Tools for DOS report that the drive supports security features and that SMART is presently enabled. I don't know how to turn either of those off.