For the record, it may be worth to note that the output of my last two postings was produced on the laptop that actually uses the drive. This laptop was booted to Fedora 11, using hdparm v9.16 and kernel kernel-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64

Previous tests were done on a PC, dedicated for drive cloning/preparing/repairing, that was booted to Fedora 12 or Ubuntu 9.10 Live, using various kernel and hdparm versions.

On both the laptop and the PC, the drive would boot up frozen and was unfrozen after hot replugging.

Pim