Password truncated

["charmie@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <charmie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  Was trying out a SuSE 7.0 installation .. due to a bad HDD with a few 
thousand bad sectors, the installation messed up. -- However, when am 
trying to assign a password for the root or create the inital password for 
root. Its truncating my password to 8 characters - is that normal ? Or, 
that's due to the messy installation ..
Also, RH 6.0 used to run pretty cool on that disk, tho, X-server created 
some problems but SuSE couldn't just complete the installation .. it even 
had problem with RH 6.2 so I moved back..does that show, RH 6.0 is a 
powerful distro than RH 6.2 or SuSE or something of that sort ? Dunno just 
couldn't think of something else ..