I have installed a mandrake 9.1 I had laying around on my old windows 95 box. Pentium, 166 mhz 36 megabytes of ram or so. The thing is when I try to boot, after it goes through the normal BIOS screens and such it gives several row's of "40"s and then reboots itself. This seems familer to me like I had heard/experienced it before, but I just can't remember where. I let the disks install the boot loader Lilo on the system, and think it might be somewhere in the config, but I'm unable to figure out exactly what I need to do.


Any help would be appreciated.

It is your boot-loader. It's misconfigured. You either are using LILO or GRUB. I don't know the details, but I had the same problem. There are definately threads about this problem before. Start searching the forums using the search feature for something like "LILO" "40 40 40" and such.

I'm sorry I can't tell you how to fix the problem but that is most likely the problem. I have actually experienced it in SuSE 9.1, too. Though, this has happened to me on other distros before too.

Sounds like the old 1024 cylinder problem. If you got Lilo off Mandy 9.1 I guess it's a possibility.
Try getting the Lilo files below cylinder 1024. Depends on the disk geometry, but if you have Win95 partition first, try shrinking it - to say 5 Gig or so.

Total newbie at this, I understand the concept of what your saying, I've read a page or two somewhere about HDD geomatry, ,but HOW do I move lilo down like that?

The best solution is to use a current lilo version - then you won't have to do anything.
See if you can boot into your install using the recovery floppy you created. If so go get a current version of lilo, and install that. Should fix the problem after that simply by re-running the lilo command.

Otherwise, you might have to move the partition containing lilo below cylinder 1024 - this is dependant on the drive. Simplest is probably to just pick a number - as I suggested, say 5 Gig.

From Windows, Partition Magic or such can be used to shrink the first partition to make room, and also to move the Linux partition down to the newly freed space.
From linux, parted can do likewise.

After backing up your data of course.

Thank you for input, will try to get a newer version of lilo on it, doing some googling on that right now.

I'm getting really frustrated with this now, I found the page http://home.san.rr.com/johninsd/pub/linux/lilo/ and downloaded to a floppy to transfer over, uncompressed and someoen told me to go from .tar to useable to do a tar xvf whatever.tar

Did that, ,but didn't get teh same list of files in the PDF doc on the same site above, and now I have no idea what to do. I feel so un geekish having to beg for help like this =/

EDIT


I vaugely rememebred hearing about something called LBA when I was doing some reading, found a setting in my BIOS for it, switched it on, lo and behold, she boots. I love google.