okay.. problem i am having is after installing yes sever and sme with the hard drive and dvd rom drive on a maxtor ata 133 controller card (with promise chip set) . the install seems to go fine until reboot.. then it can't find the hard drive and hangs with an L ? too bad i can't figure out how to get a screenie to show..

the commputer is an old p3 500 with 512 meg of memory. gonna have to take it apart to get more info about the sysboard. maxtor 60 gb hd.. ati all in wonder 128 rage.. (will take it apart later to get more info)

also as a side note fc4 and fc5 would hang on installation.. never had that happen with fedora before. (on other pc's)

please go easy on me.. just starting to get serious about learning linux.. want to build several types of linux distros and was hoping to use this machine to test them and build them..

thanx

Your problem may be an old BIOS that is not capable of addressing the entire hard drive. Linux only using the BIOS to address the hard drive during boot. If your kernel is located beyond the address limits of your BIOS then LILO fails but otherwise Linux works OK with the old BIOS and large drive.

If that is your problem then you can solve it by creating a small partition at the beginning of the hard drive for /boot. That insures that the kernel is within your BIOS address range.

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Steve Stites