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I have two pieces of slightly imperfect newish hardware:

1) Fast (3.8GHz) computer that came with dead cpu, which we replaced with 
something slower (the PC3200 memory is now faster than the cpu bus speed, 
and PC2700 memory actually runs faster in here).

There is an SATA controller but I set BIOS to boot from IDE.

The board may have been damaged by whatever killed the cpu. PQMagic 
complains of a partition table error (108 or 110) on three different IDE 
hard disks, all of which were formatted with PQM itself (in another 
computer).  (Possibly with a later version, 8 instead of the 5 which I 
have on this computer). The software on the disks works perfectly anyway. 
Maybe BIOS has some problem which linux is ignoring.

2) 100GB IDE hard drive (given to us as secondary slave in an XP machine 
where XP was primary slave and booted from there as 'HDD-0').  I sys'ed it 
several times but it will not boot to DOS.  I can boot with a DOS boot 
floppy disk or another hard drive (PQMagic does not like the other drive 
either).

I am trying to use a lilo boot floppy disk instead.

Basiclinux is not in the first 1024 cylinders.

Large Disk HOWTO said to put the kernel and other files used during bootup 
into the first 1024 cylinders so I copied /boot/* to /hda1/bl2 (DOS).
I tried without and with this.

My lilo floppy boot disk booted as far as LI, which means it "loaded the 
second stage boot loader but failed to execute it, which is typically 
caused by a subtle geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/boot.b without 
running the map installer."

What might I try next, other than booting with DOS boot floppy (with 
config.sys and autoexec.bat suitable for then running from hard disk) and 
then using loadlin?  Would some other bootloader work, from HD or floppy? 
Should I try partitioning a test hard disk with BL3 fdisk or even DOS 
fdisk and see if it can be made to boot?

Sindi


keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org