Hi all. Okay, I've been working at this problem for days now and its driving me insane...

Basically, all was well until I upgraded my BIOS to the latest non-beta version. The BIOS works fine now (it was quite buggy before), BUT... Linux won't boot! More specifically, it won't even get past GRUB!

I've tried everything I can think of. I've re-installed GRUB via:

But no luck. I've formatted and re-installed SUSE 10, that didn't work (the install worked, but it still couldn't boot). And here's the wierd part... I even swapped 2 of my hard-drives around so the other one (which was previously hdd) is now hda, re-installed SUSE on hda1, and it STILL doesn't boot!

All it ever says is "Grub Geom Error". Actually, before the reinstalls, it just said "GRUB" and then a load of gobbledygook. At least that's gone now!

I can boot knoppix from CD (I'm still using 3.7 - haven't got around to downloading new one yet!) and can mount my hard drives in it, so perhaps that will help?

Any help will be much appreciated. I'm not exactly a but I'm no expert either!

My system:
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (BIOS version 1015)
AMD Athlon64 3700+
512Mb of RAM that checks out ok in Memtest86
hda = 60Gb IBM
hdb = 160Gb Maxtor
hdc = CDRW/DVD Combo drive
hdd = 10Gb Quantum Fireball
Antec TruePowerII 550W
nVidia GeForce 6500 256Mb PCI-E (Brand Inno3D)
Belkin 802.11g Wireless Card (PCI)
A pretty old Winmodem which I might throw out soon!

Oh yeah, I feel really bad for trying this, but I installed Windows and it worked. I know, I know, Windows is evil, but I was at my wit's end! If this GRUB problem is solved then I can get Windows off my computer once and for all! So please help!

It's got to be something in the bios setup. Enter your bios setup program and check it out. Look in the disk section and try changing things there, particularly look at the "LBA" setting and see if it's set to LBA mode. IIRC it should be. Your new bios flash changed some default setting in the bios; that's the most likely explanation.

I've been looking around and I can't find anything to do with LBA in the BIOS. I've searched through all the 'pages'. The only harddrive-related options that it has are to do with S.M.A.R.T. monitoring.