Hello, all. I'm new to this board, but definitely gonna bookmark it. This place looks great.

I'm having some problems booting. I'm relatively new to Linux, and have installed it a couple of times successfully in the past, but this time I'm stuck and can't seem to find a way around it. In short, I can boot from floppy just fine, but not my HD. Tried repartitioning and reinstalled Debian as well.

hda is my primary drive, has Win2k on it. Don't really care if Linux can see it, but it'd be nice. 60 GB IDE

hdb is dedicated to linux. I've got it in a removable docking bay so I can swap out the HD easily. 3.2 GB IDE, partitioned into a primary 2.7 GB partition and a .5 GB swap partition. I've successfully booted Linux with this drive before, but using a now-dead motherboard. New MB is ECS K7S5A (SiS 735 chipset)

I set the BIOS to boot first from the second HD, so I can limit my experimentation to that drive. When I want to use win2k, I just turn off the docking bay and the system starts fine. When I use a Linux boot disk, all is well. (2.2 kernel) However, when I try to boot from the HD, LILO stops at "LI", at which point I can CTRL-ALT-DEL. I also tried using the GRUB boot loader, and with it, I just get "GRUB" and the system hangs - hard reset required.

I've poked around in the configuration of each of these loaders. Tried lba and linear options (on and off) with LILO, as well as specifying drive geometry according to BIOS and HD manufacturer. I'm not very familiar with GRUB, so I used the grub-install script. Not much configuration of GRUB to be done yet other than a device map, (since I'm not concerned about a menu yet) from which I tried removing hda in case the large disk size was hosing it. Still no luck. My research online has encountered exactly one similar case in a newsgroup about a year ago - but no answer for it.

Would any of you have a suggestion? I'm pretty free to experiment with different loaders since I only have a minimal clean install on the hdb. I tried the nuni boot loader, but must have done something wrong because it wouldn't boot after that even with a boot disk. I was thinking of trying chos.

Thanks!

Welcome to LQ.

I have had success with that particular mobo. Try turning off USB OS aware in the BIOS. Make sure there's NO cable select on the HD's.

Try removing the 1st HD and installing Windows on 2nd HD. If it doesn't work, then you know what's the problem.

Thanks for the welcome and suggestions, jetblackz. Here are the results:

No "USB aware OS" setting - there is a "PnP aware OS" setting, is this what you mean? There are two USB related BIOS settings. One to enable USB at all, and one to allow DOS to see USB devices. I can't really turn either off since my kb and mouse are USB. But I'll do it anyway and hook up ps2 versions tonight and see if it makes a difference.

HDs are not set to cable select. Standard master/slave config, both on same channel. CD & DVD on other channel.

Windows 98 boots off of hdb fine, even without removing hda which contains the Win2k installation. (Good thought, though.)

While I was messing with that I wondered if having hda and hdb both with active partitions might be affecting the linux loaders, so I used parted and tried setting up the system with only one active (boot) partition (tried with each drive). Didn't make any difference, except that when hda wasn't active Win2k wouldn't boot, as expected.

Also tried chos. It dies before the menu comes up, no output at all. But at least I can still CTRL-ALT-DEL, unlike grub. So far, looks like I've had the best luck with LILO.

So I'm still stuck. Any other ideas?