Well, since I had an extra hour before leaving for work I figured it wouldn't hurt to tru and see if the floppy option worked out, if it didn't I could still swap my old drive back in and everything would be back to the way it was ...
So I tried it, ..., and it worked.
I'm now on the exat same system I was before but on a brand new drive.
I swapped the old drive in as slave on /dev/hdb to have extra storage space and voila!
I guess it didn't hurt to have the exact same drives as my hdparm output shows
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Icebox:~# hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 65535/16/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0
Icebox:~# hdparm /dev/hdb
/dev/hdb:
multcount = 0 (off)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 65535/16/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0
Both 80GB WD Caviars with 8MB cache.
Anyway, as it turns out the drive wasn't even faulty as far as I can tell now, or I would have reall bad luck and have the same stuff happening on my new drive.
The thing that happens with my pc is that my graphics hang every 10 seconds or so, be it a screensaver, a game or whatever graphical app that should be fluid.
I already swapped graphics several times and even added more memory, from 384 to 512 just to be sure it wasn't that.
So I thought it might be bad performance from the hard drive with periodic disk accesses or something similar (I had that happen to me with Windows years ago) and swapped the drive succesfully, only to see that the problem remains.
Any idea what could cause this - besides the motherboard being faulty?