I have a test machine I use to play with various operating systems; practicing installs, playing with securities, practicing scripting, etc. I have a 2G (!), 8G and 10G drive for these vaious installs. I have been able to put Novell 5.0 on the 2G and 8G fine, Linux (RH7.3) and Win2K server on the 10G fine; but neither Novell 6 nor Win2K server will install onto the 8G. I get a BSD on the W2K reboot prior to installation and Novell 6 says it can't create the SYS volume (even after creating and formating the 200MB DRDOS boot partition.

It is a fujitsu MD3084AT and I go the utilities here to check it. The checking util says it has "LBA: 0097b7db STS:51 ERR: 40, Unrecoverable error" This is reproducable.

There must be a physical defect on the drive stopping the thing from being initialised by the OS.
I CAN boot into Novell 5, Win2K and make it an additional partition (netware and NTFS), formatted and mirrored the primary drive (lotsa dirve accesses) with no problems. Just cant install a newer OS on it.
I have tried DBAN on it without any errors.

any clues?