Good afternoon everyone.

I've been looking everywhere and I'm coming up quite short. The topic has been brought up everwhere, but to little resolve if any.

I have a modest P3 1GHz that has run Redhat 8/9 just fine for over a year. It's a spare machine, and I figured it would be a hoot to try out some different distributions now that Redhat has made it's unfortunate dichotomy.

Installed Debian Sarge first. I did a net-install, so the first boot is quite spartan. All I got was "GRUB" repeated infinitely on the screen. Fine. Bootloader issues happen all the time. Unfortunately nothing would fix it short of running GRUB from a floppy. At that time I didn't try LILO.

I decided it was all Debian's fault and it wasn't worth all of this. More fish in the sea. Solaris 10 is now in free evaluation status, so I figured it would be fine time to try it out. Worked great. Bootloader, whatever it uses, worked perfectly, and the system started fine. No complaints, short of Solaris being well... ya.

Off it went. Tried Debian again for kicks. Same GRUB repeating issue.

Well, the cute Linux geek girl I work with said I'd be her hero if I tried Gentoo... Who could say no? Well, I did. Got 'er all installed and ready and rebooted...

GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB ...

I did some more legwork. Something about Stage 2 not being found, or a sour MBR that I should try rewriting with LILO, to see if that works. Ok, sure! Reboot...

L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 ...

From what I could find out there that's the LILO version of the same sort of error.

I'm at a complete loss. How is it that RH9 can run GRUB just fine, and Solaris' whatever bootloader as well, but these other two completely disparate distros do the exact same thing?

I've tried a second drive to precisely the same result. I'm installing to the MBR most times. For kicks I tried another partition, but that was to no avail either.

So, without Windows anywhere in the building, is there any way to totally wipe the MBR? Is there a potion I can concoct? Apparently wing of bat, gnat's breath and goat's blood are easier to come by than the answer to this crazed issue at this point.

Any feedback is most welcome, and I look forward to belittling or otherwise thrashing this machine into utter submission.

Thanks all in advance,

Gregoj

Wouldn't you know it...

Some stupid BIOS setting. Once I forced what kind of drive was at Primary, it was just fine.

Sorry for the long post. I'm simply relieved it's all over now!

Best,
Gregoj