This whole deal is so weird. Maybe someone who knows more about hardware than I do can shed some light.. but I can still think of no reason why your access to boot from CD or floppy would be affected unless there is something going on with the BIOS.

Glad you guys figured it out.

Just for the record, I am writing this on a new laptop that has the following partition structure:

1. Active Pri-Dos 10122Mbyte Fat32 (this has WinME on it)
2. Non-Dos 5094Mbyte Ext2 (RH7.0 root)
3. Non-Dos 162Mbyte (RH7.0 swap)
4. Ext-Dos 3699Mbyte (Contains 1 logical Fat32drive)

The only problems I had during install were with the "linear" vs. "lba32" LILO option that I have already discussed.

This machine came preinstalled with WinME and I just used FIPS to break the main Fat32 partition and then installed Redhat on the resulting freespace.

wow... u know, i also have same problems with RH7 after trying what gedi's been trying... do you guys do the TEXT installation?
well i did... like 5 times. 5 times out of 5, after installation, the message that 'you have successfully installed RH7' will appear... but in the blue background, there is a warning message saying something about the MBR being corrupted or something (i think!). i can't make out the entire warning message here because it's being blocked by the 'you have successfully installed RH7' thingy... i don't know why this happens...
in any case, i made the boot floppy at every install... and RH7 boots up fine from the floppy, but not otherwise. the floppy boots fine irregardless of the partition size... well, at least on my system it does...

just my little input...

I have found that,if you can afford this option,its the best way to go:
Get a decent removable hdd rack with an extra tray and put your operating systems on thier own hdd.You can use smaller sized hdds and its as simple as pulling one tray out and putting another in.
My setup is like this:
2 computers with 4 operating systems Win2k,winnt wkstn,winnt server,Mandrake 7.1.Each on it's own hdd.
I use the windows OSes for a home networking lab to help me with my education and Linux for everything else.
Like I said,this is my solution to all the problems that arise when using more than 1 OS.
lynch

Oh yes every body seems to have problem with the 20 gb hard disk,dual booting and MBR. Now it time that JEREMY or some SENIOR MEMBER to come in and give elobrate solution on how to go about with the dual booting and MBR problem I have tried reading "large disk howto" but it just explains about the problem but does not give any solution.

I don't know how to copy and paste or create a link in these forums, but if you go to the linux - Installation "LILO" thread, you'll see how I did my installation. (2) rather large drives (18gig & 12 gig). Win-Crap on one, and Linux on the other.

I tried this Dual boot single drive buisness, and its can be a real Brain-Ache at times, especially if your try different version all the time.

I opt for two drive just for sanity sake.

KE1HA

Hey Gedi1, where did you get that Wipe utility? I could use it for destroying sensitive data.

I got my copy of Wipe from http://www.bootdisk.com
They also have a program called CleanSlate that clears partitions and saves the MBR.
lynch