I have a series 2 (TCD540080) with a WK upgrade (Added a 500G Segate). It has been flaky ever since the upgrade. So to be clear, I added a 500G Segate(slave, no jumpers) and kept the original Maxtor 80GB drive(master, one jumper). Its in my garage so I don't really use it frequently(which is why I've allowed this problem to drag on). The problems I see are the ones I've seen all over this forum where the unit is slow to boot, slow to change channels...generally slow. Lots of freeze ups in the middle of viewing a show(in real time or a recorded playback). I never get blank screens, it always shows "just a few more minutes", "powering up"...etc. Sometimes it will get stuck in one of the initialization screens.

So I tried the Kickstart 54 (long overnight) and immediately saw something strange. When at the screen that shows /dev/hda, /dev/dbb, for some strange reason, I have an entry for /dev/hdc. How is this occurring?? if I only have two drives. I know enough about Linux to know that there must be multiple partitions on one of the drives for this to happen. I do have a USB to ethernet adapter in one of the USB slots but that should not show up as a hard drive. When I run the overnight test, the test starts out doing random reads on the partitions (/dev/hda first, then /dev/hdb...and on). When the test is running on hda I saw a pattern of dots(different colors) on the screen. hda passed and then it moved on to hdb where I didn't see any dots and eventually the test reported a failure on hdb and the test stopped. So this is where I left it.

- Why do I see three drives/partitions when running Kickstart 54??????
- is there a test that I can do by installing the drives on a PC that can determine the health of the drvies(I have both a WinXPsp3 and a Ubuntu8.10 system with IDE buses).

Thanks