Hi all,

Well this problem has kinda stumped me, and i have thought of everything possible, but to no avail. Until last night i had two HD's in my comp, HDA was win2k and HDB is Slackware 9.0. I had to take HDA out of my PC and reformat it to install it in another computer, and since i have deinstalled the drive, my computer sits at the bios boot screen for literally 3 or 4 minutes. It used to only take about 15 seconds for it to get past that initial boot screen and bring up the lilo screen. Now like i said it hangs for a while and then eventually boots off of the CD, i realize that i need to reinstall thats why i am booting from CD.

so i have reset the BIOS, taken the ram out and made sure its in securely, and fixed the jumper on the drive to master, since it is now the only drive in the system. But the weirdest part of all of this is that at the BIOS screen it says that i have an AMD Athlon 1500+, but i have a 2100+, so i found this rather strange...if anyone has any suggestions please let me know, this is driving me mad!!

You need to set the bios to boot off the primary slave or set the jumpers on the drive to make it primary master.

Forgot, if you where using a boot loader like lilo you will need a boot disk to boot to Linux. Since most people have lilo write to the mbr of the first hard drive. If you do not have a boot disk, I believe that you can boot to the install CD and when you get to the part where you hit enter to install type rescue. I believe that this will boot to Linux and then you can edit the /etc/lilo.conf file then type lilo to install it.

I recently upgraded my CPU from a Duron 950 to an Athlon XP 2200+. When I first started the box up the bios incorrectly probed it as an Athlon 1600+, and used a slower clock speed than the chip is capable of. I fixed it by changing the buspeed and the processor speed in my bios.

I can't speak intellegently about your bios...but have a look as I suspect that you may have the same problem. Tweak the settings until your bios correctly identifies your CPU. You can start by looking for a setting called "CPU Frequency"...change it from 100mhz to 133mhz

Also note - if your Linux distro was happily sitting on a slave drive, when you make the drive a master you will have to edit files (principally /etc/fstab and your bootloader configuration) to reflect the new setup - otherwise it'll still be looking for stuff as hdb rather than the new hda. Did that make sense?