Ok...  I have since installed the same Eval CD on the same machine 2 more
times doing the same exact things as the time that is appeard to kill my
hard drive with no ill effects what so ever.  I believe in reality what
killed the drive was windows itself on a bad shutdown with a little help
from me hitting the power during a write :)
I believe that I can now highly recommed that whoever has the SuSE Live Eval
cd, go ahead and give it a try.  It is a excelent install and everything
appears to just work right off the bat.  I think I'm gonna carry this thing
around just in case I ever get stuck using someones windows install for long
periods of time.  This way I can have something decent to work on that is
mine :)

I hope that I didn't cause anyone any undo scares with me jumping the gun on
reporting a bad disk

Brian Cluff