[SOLVED] hard drive installation issues

[aluminumspleen]

Hello, I'm building a computer, and I would like to install some version of Linux on it.

I recently bought a Western Digital SATA 500GB Hard Drive, and it came with this CD to "set up" the drive. Unfortunatly, the CD only works when run from a Windows system. It does say it will boot off the CD in some DOS way, but when I do this, it says my cd drive doesn't have a 'generic' driver. It is an external USB Samsung DVD/CD drive (is the external part the problem?).

What's going on, eh? I'm currently trying to run the installation programs through Wine using a version of Puppy I installed on a Flash Drive. I have made "progress"; that is, I've successfully installed Wine, and got some of it working, but I keep getting a fixme: WD_ERASEBKGND error, so it ends up just doing nothing.

P.S. Puppy is the only distro I could get to boot off the Live CD. I thought it was a hard-drive problem because off the live CD, Puppy downloads to the RAM. Is it the CD drive, being attached by an external USB cord (a short one--I know USB tends to get less reliable with distance)?

Suggestions? Corrections about anything I mis-said/mis-thought? Until I get this baby working, I've got to run Live CDs off my laptop, and can't really get into the fun stuff of Linux knowing that I'll have to start from scratch everytime I boot up my computer. Thank you so much in advance!

[oz]

No, you shouldn't need any of the software that came on CD with your WD SATA drive.

I just installed two 160 GB WD SATA drives and Linux recognized them both immediately during the installation. I'm currently using Arch, but Ubuntu also recognized them immediately.

Check your BIOS settings for hard drive options if your installer is not working with that drive.

[aluminumspleen]

hey ozar, thanks so much for responding, both to this and my other posts. I've been in this community for less than three days, and I already feel so welcomed

thinking about what you said, and trying out openSuSE (which shows you the processes it's doing), it looks like it loads up perfectly fine, then doesn't show anything on the screen after it's loaded. again, I am not very trusting of the external drive, but this seems weird since Puppy will show the screen no problem, and all the graphical loadup images are on the screen...strange. Thoughts?

[aluminumspleen]

it was xvesa. i don't have xorg, for some reason, only xvesa. I found a way to run the ubuntu live cd using xvesa, and was able to install with it, and it works. Thanks for all your help!