I am putting a system together that is using the second hard drive from my previous system (the MBR was on the first HD). I need to mark the first partition as bootable so that I can install the necessary-evil OS before I can install slack. fdisk and cfdisk both give me the message "unable to open /dev/hda", but I can view the partitions with qparted, and have even played some music files on /dev/hda5 with xmms. I'm using Knoppix at the moment. I know of no other way to mark the partition as bootable than through fdisk.


What is the issue here? thanks

Are you absolutely positively sure the HDD in question is configured as hda?

Knoppix and Qparted list it as /dev/hda. I've tried /dev/hd* with * being a-f, all with the same result.

My best guess is something is wrong with IDE cable or HD jumpers. Please double-check these.

The jumpers were changed appropriately, and I'd be surprised if I could have accessed the drive like I have if the IDE cable was malfunctioning.

You'd be even more surprised if you'd know how weird HDD's can function when cable is crippled (or C/S cable is misused).
Seriously, there cannot be much more than an hardware problem. My second best guess is something is wrong with /dev filesystem. By any chance, may your root filesystem be mounted with 'nodev' option?

As I mentioned, this hd used to be the master drive in my old system. I put the old slave hd in the exact configuration as I had before and put the jumpers as before also. This time it booted up and gave me LILO, as before. I clicked on the Windows partition and it went there. It continued the setup process for installing windoze, which I cancelled, but it was the direction I was looking for. The thing is, this slave is an old drive and I don't want it in my new system, so I took it back out. I booted up with slack 10.0. I got to the root prompt before setup. Cfdisk would not allow access to /dev/hda giving error messages, but fdisk would. I got in, deleted all partitions on the master (now the only drive) and recreated all of them, ensuring that the first partition was bootable. I go to reinstall windows 2000 and it puts the necessary files on the hd and reboots. I get to the point where I'm to let it boot from the hard disk, and it does the same thing as before. It gives me:

L 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 ..etc... 01

and hangs up.

I've put the jumpers on both "cable select" and "master w/0 slave", both with the same result. I've rechecked BIOS. I don't see how this drive can be co-dependent at this point.

I agree this has to be hardware. This really has me stumped. The /dev filesystem is reading the same regardless of the program I check it with.

I'd recommend to use 'dd' to overwrite the MBR and the beginning of the disk with FF's. Can't remember the exact command from memory, search LQ, it is mentioned many times here. This L(i) 01 01 thing is a broken old Lilo installation and has to be removed.

Try the following, then reinstall something - Windoze, Linux, shouldn't matter (all you partitions will be gone).If you still have problems, try this;
- do the following *only* if you intend to put a M$ost O/S on the disk first.
Even then, I can only confirm XP can handle this (because I specifically tested it), not Win2k.
Linux (as in {c}fdisk) will NOT talk to the disk after this, until a partition table (actually the signature bytes) has been written back to the disk.

Clear ... ???XP installer will tell you you have an unformatted disk, and ask if you want to continue - hopefully W2k will do likewise.

thank you both so very much. The crippled lilo was indeed the problem, and the suggested solution took care of it.