How to Install Linux So That it Boots

From: Al Christians (achrist_at_easystreet.com)
Date: 02/17/04

  • Next message: David: "Re: RH9 GRUB error: mixed IDE/SCSI, no boot floppy" 
    Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 22:29:44 -0800

    I've been trying (with no success) for about 8 days now to install linux
    so that it will boot from a new hard drive. Here's what I've got:

    1. A new Athlon XP-2500 chip with 512 MB of RAM.

    2. A new motherboard sold by Fry's on sale a couple weeks ago to work
    with that CPU.

    3. A new Western Digital 80 GB hard drive.

    For some reason, this combination goes very slowly when attempting to
    boot. It takes several minutes for it to tell me that it's not able to
    find a boot disk. It will boot linux from a CD or bootable floppy, but
    the hard disk is never bootable. Exactly once, I got Red Hat to start
    to boot, so that a message came on the screen acknowledging that linux
    was being booted, but this crashed within a minute or so thereafter.
    Every other time I get that message about inserting a boot disk and
    pressing a key.

    Except that the hard drive won't boot and sometimes gets munged up so
    that the OS doesn't see it at all, the drive shows no signs of being
    sick. Linux installs fine, but just won't boot.

    Among the things that I've tried:

    0. A different motherboard (older) that may have originally formatted
    the drive as LBA. The BIOS setup of the new motherboard doesn't give
    any options that look to be related to LBA at all.

    1. Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware (with 2.4.22 kernel), MEPIS, ...

    2. Using DOS fdisk to partition the drive before installing linux.

    3. Using KILLDISK to zero out everything on the drive before installing
    linux.

    4. Marking the hda1 partition active using DOS fdisk.

    5. Marking the hda1 partition bootable with cfdisk.

    6. Marking the hda1 partition bootable with linux fdisk.

    6. Installing the bootloader in the MBR.

    7. Installing the bootloader at the start of the hda1 partiotion.

    8. Letting the linux installers have the whole disk to do what they
    wanted to, accepting all the defaults.

    9. Formatting the drive with Windows NT of Windows 2000 setup disks
    befor trying to install linux.

    10. Booting with nodma or allowcddma options.

    11. Disabling and enabling DMA in the bios.

    Is there a step-by-step or checklist of what I should be sure to do to
    make this work? Anything that I haven't listed that could be causing
    this?

    TIA,

    Al

  • Next message: David: "Re: RH9 GRUB error: mixed IDE/SCSI, no boot floppy"

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