[Techtalk] redhat vs suse

[Rachel Herold]

History:
my original hard drive died.  I had windoze and SuSe 6.2 on that drive, dual
boot.
an aquantance gave me a couple of rather old 406mb drives.
I installed windoze on one of them.
The other drive was empty, fdisk'ed.

Current:
I just got a copy of RedHat 7.2 from a friend and was thinking I'd put
Redhat on instead of SuSe.
Redhat couldn't seem to find the drive.  It found it, but apparently
couldn't access it when it went to format it.  Kept giving me an error and
spitting the disk back out and shutting down.
Being curious, I tried SuSe 6.2 and it found the drive, formatted it, and
installed.

Question:
why wouldn't redhat find the drive?

Theories:
this disk is a bit small.  Only the Suse minimum install would fit.  I'm
guessing maybe that the redhat install was too large for the disk so it
defaulted to not finding it or some such?
I didn't try the Redhat server install, I was trying the Workstation
install.  SuSe automatically installs as a server I think, from what it
looks like to me.

thanks,
Rachel