I have 2 maxtor hard drives set as master and slave with jumper settings according to the maxtor web site. The first hard drive I use for Win2k and have installed RH 9 on the second drive with lilo installed on the root of that drive (/dev/hdb1).

When I try to boot using the boot floppy I get a boot failed message and if I set ide1 as the 1st boot device in the bios I get li error on boot.

SMART is disabled and I've checked the hard drive jumpers again. Tried reinstalling RH 9 but same problem! (did have RH 8 on this pc when I was using 1 hard drive)

Any suggestions?

If you mean the redhat boot floppy, you should have your filesystem modules included with it. ext3 or reiserfs ins't in a default linux bootfloppy. Create this in the control panel of rh with your current kernel config.

If you mean a windows bootfloppy, yea, it's gonna be hosed because lilo is the bootloader, and vfat can't see linux partitions on top of that.

sorry for not giving that info!

The boot floppy I'm using is the one that was created during the linux installation. It should be able to boot into linux, was able to in RH 7.2

Problem solved.

Reinstalled RH 9 again! (as had no way to boot into linux to change any settings) This time selected force lba32 in the advanced boot loader options during setup and I'm in.

Mr.Scum, just out of curiousity did you update your kernel to a newer version after you installed RH7.2?

No, just installed 7.2 coz I had the disks. It had problems with some of my hardware (via sound & adsl modem) so I did a clean install of RH 9.

I was using the 7.2 boot disk to boot into RH 7.2, and the 9 boot disk for RH 9 (was not clear about that in the above posts).