I'll get right to it. My system:

MOBO: Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum
CPU: Athlon 1.33MHz
Hard drive: 100GB
Kernel: 2.4.20

With a 52-day uptime, I powered down on Friday night to install a new CD-RW. I opened my case, removed the old (basic) CD drive (it would spin, but it never detected any medium in the drive) and installed the new CD drive. I plugged everything back in, rebooted....and the problems began.

Essentially, it wouldn't boot. I could boot from a floppy or a CD and the actual hard-drive was fine---all my files were there, everything was totally okay. I just can't _boot_ from the hard drive. We ran through some of the obvious things: checked cables (weird, but possible) and replaced the boot sector with a new LILO. No dice.

We upgraded my system to Slackware 9.0 and _still_ couldn't get it to boot from the hard drive. Finally, concerned the drive was dying, we ran out and bought a new drive (120GB at Fry's with a $60 mail-in rebate!) and installed it. With 2 drives (so we could get my stuff off the old drive) and a CD-ROM installed, this is how we connected everything:

IDE0 -- new drive as "master"
IDE1 -- old drive as "slave" and CD drive as "master"

We checked the jumpers for the drives (all three) and made sure everything matched up to what we thought we were doing. We rebooted....and the *^*%* thing booted my old drive without any problems! It _skipped_ the new drive and went on to the old drive, where it found the boot sector. Since then, we've changed cables (another weird one, since we can still _see_ the drive), but we're having the same problem.

At this point, I'm wondering if there's something wacko with my IDE0 port on my MOBO. Anyone have any other suggestions? I'm powering down here in a minute to do another "cable check" and to get the text of the message I get (all caps, I remember that) when it tells me it can't boot.

Thanks for reading this far,
Anne.

so you're saying that now the computer only boots from a hard drive that is the secondary slave?
you shouldn't have a hard drive as a slave to a cdrom anyway.
what does the computer do with just the old hard drive hooked up, nothing else?

Feeling pretty foolish right now....

It turns out that the single drive (the new one) on the primary IDE is HDD0 in my BIOS setup----in between the CD and Floppy, etc---and not with HDD1, HDD2, etc. So.....when we set up BIOS to look for boot disks, we never said to look on the primary IDE bus. Now, I'm getting the L 99 99.... which I've seen responded to elsewhere, so I'm off to read those responses now that it is my problem!

I still don't know why the old hard drive started doing this after I put a new CD-ROM on the secondary IDE bus.....I will probably never know!

Anne.