watch out for the "tohd" cheat code

[foamrotreturns]

have you tried a lowlevel format? or perhaps first a "zeroing" of the disk (if that is not enough try low level formating).

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd bs=512

What does the bs=512 do? I have formatted with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda before, but I am not sure what the bs does...