Downloaded and burned InstantCake CD without problems. Disconnected Windows disk, put CD-ROM on IDE primary slave and new Maxtor on IDE secondary master. Mobo has SATA, but they are disabled in BIOS.

Cake boots just fine, and installation proceeds until the following message:

Restore failed: First target drive is too small.
tpip: unknown bootpage signature 0x0

The drive was new in the wrapper, so I doubt it has a Windows signature on it.

This is an ASUS mobo with Athlon 64 CPU. In reviewing the forums, there appears to be an occasional problem with this configuration. I'm guessing that this bootpage signature is written to Cyl 0 Head 0 Sect 0. Could the BIOS be blocking writes here? There is nothing in the BIOS setup to turn off virus protection.

I tried the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc count=160G
It fails writing the first byte. Don't remember the exact message, but it was similar to the 'drive too small'.

I suspect I need to find a different computer. Will InstantCake clean up any prior wreckage left on the disk when I try to bake this drive again, or do I need to take some action?

Thanks!