hi !

I experienced the problem that the harddisk is not detected anymore on my laptop after having installed suse 7.2.

the hardware:
noname (gericom) laptop
PII,256MB RAM, 10GBHD,CDR

the config before:
PrimaryPartition: Win98SE FAT32
Extended Partition: 2 Partitions with NTFS,Win2kPro and Win2k Server

all 3 OS were bootable

the action:

I decided to drop my Win98 Partition to free space to try a real (without using tools like vmware) Linux on a native partition; so i formated the first partition and made a native LINUX with reiserFS - I left the remaining partitions untouched.

after having installed LINUX I shut the system down to see if i the NT-bootoption is still available but the only result was that after completing the POST my laptop beeped 3 times (like having no RAM installed) and stopped.

some solutions:

when removing the harddisk, telling the system that no hd is installed (BIOS), and reinstalling the hd i can boot with linux-bootdisks and setup linux.
Though I am writing the MBR on the hd but the system does not boot.

I also tried to boot the installed system with bootdisks and the cd and then make a boodisk - but when booting from this disk the laptop just keeps writing "01" on the screen.

I don't think that this problem only occurs on laptops

thanks for any help in advance

puk1e

Sounds to me like the installer was not directed to write Lilo, or Grub, or whatever bootloader you use to the MBR. Perhaps you're telling the installer to write the bootloader to "hda1" instead of "hda".

If the BIOS doesn't find a bootloader on any bootable device, it won't boot.