Install fails on a particular hard drive

[hglman]

I have tried to install, 8.04 both desktop and server, and 8.10 as well as gentoo and winxp on one of my hard drives. All of them failed to be bootable. Grub will load some time, but will tell me, can not mount root partition. With winxp I can even install it on the drive with a partition doesn't exist error, just after I told it to make one. Also, the total drive size would be less than it should be in the partition set up utility on install.

I did succeed in installing 8.04 server on a different drive. Got all the hardware to work, etc. I could even use the drive that would not boot in the install.

Any idea what could be causing this and how to fix it?

[cariboo]

I would go to the hard drive's manufuacturers web site and download their diagnostic tools and run them on your hard drive. The tools are free and they will tell whether you can turst your hard drive or not.