I have been booting my computer from a boot floppy since RH5. I kept upgrading till I reached Fedora always booting from the floppy. When booting from the HD all I ever got was a big red Compaq on a black baqckground. While fiddling around with the new parts and waiting for the rest of the system to arrive I made this discovey. I replaced the HD ribbon cable with a Ultra ATA cable just to see if anything was different. I removed the HD shorting clips, took out the floppy and booted up. LO!! The lilo window opened. The first time I've seen a boot loader window. As I stared in amazement the window closed and my OS finished loading.

So, who knows why this would happen and could it be a clue as to why some people experience booting problems?

Regards, Donald

Jumper problems and bad cables, or cables not designed to work with UDMA on a UDMA enabled disk are the cause of many boot problems.

Disks should be jumpered for master, slave or, standalone on some. Cable select causes problems.

Some disks come with a floppy to boot up and configure or test your disk.