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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?
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I have a system that I was trying to install SUSE 9.2 on all week. I could get through the installation fine, but when it tried to boot from the hard drive I would get the system message "Unable to boot from hard drive. Insert system disk."
If I put the SUSE install CD in and then selected Install after a few screens it would indicate that there was already a system installed on the drive. Selecting "Boot existing installation" would successfully boot the installed operation. I tried using cfdisk, using lilo, Grub, changing the boot partions, reinstalling after using the Maxtor program that completely wipes the hard drive, and the exact same problem resulted.
I had another hard drive laying around so I tried installing on that one and it worked fine the first time.
Does anyone know what may have happened to the first drive to cause the problem? I tried installing Windows NT 4.0 on it and it worked fine.
Is the "Unable to boot from hard drive. Insert system disk." an approximation of the error message or the *real* deal? Did you accidentally install GRUB or LILO in an OS partition instead of in the MBR?
Yes, first potential problemmaker is lilo/grub. Also, if you use the cd, it might use a kernel from it. Maybe your original kernel doesn't have support for the drive i.e. SATA. Just guesses here.
Distribution: Debian, Fedora 8 and 9, Mandriva 2009, Mepis, Kubuntu, SuSe 10.1, Slackware 12.1 - and Knoppix.
Posts: 155
Rep:
A Grub boot floppy is a very useful thing to have lying around when doing this stuff.
Make sure you have a valid menu.lst somewhere (either on the floppy, or on a partition). That quickly identifies whether the problem is the drive or something you did. I know, I was that soldier
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