I got this little 800mb laptop HD and a laptop-IDE to normal-IDE adapter from my freind. Anyways at first I tired to boot from it directly and it gave me the error above (doesnt say anything else just big blank screen with those 2 lines printed at the top).

then I installed VecrorLinux on it with the original partition setup (hda1 as a small swap and hda2 as the main ext2 partition) and it gives me the same error when trying to boot from the hard drive. (but I can read it just fine if I boot from a Knoppix CD, or a VL install CD)

my freind says it could be that my MBR is empty, although I dont know how should I fix my MBR so that it will boot VL (without having to reinstall linux)

if you think that the error has another cause please tell me what you think it is and how to fix it.

Memories from the days of old are boiling up :)

My first thought is that the interface for that old
HDD (IDE hdds basically have a little controller
of their own that just talks with a more generic
interface on the Mobo ....) might be unable to
boot of a partition that crosses the 504 MB limit.

Try making a 30MB ext2 /boot partition at the
very begining of the HDD, and tackle it that way.



Cheers,
Tink

I had that thought also (good thing its not the case, cause the first 50 mb are bad)

anyways it was cause none of the partitions were flaged as bootable (the 'a' option in fdisk). also I had to moove the swap partition cause as I said, the first 50mb (where the swap was) are bad.