Bios problems
 

I first got a copy of Ubuntu 5.0.4 with a linux mag, install seemed to work fine, until initial boot, when the now all too familiar grub error 21 popped it's head up, I got some advice and found that the bios couldn't detect my hard drives, I had a quick peek in the bios but being a newbie didn't want to mess things up too much so I figured I'd just get a different distros, one that didn't use Grub boot loader, Suse 9.2 Pro came with this months mag, I spotted the default was set to grub, so I switched it for lilo hoping my problems would be solved... This time the lovely message was:
L 9 99 99999 ...

(something similar anyway) so I guess the basic problem remains the same how do I get the bios to see my hard drives, Sata Raid 0
with this in mind, I thought I would search around for info and came across this

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bu.../msg00082.html

but before I would mess things up I thought it a good idea to choose the safe default option in the bios... that was a mistake, after reboot my computer made a horrible clicking sound, and the monitor didn't show anything, couldn't see what was happening but nothing seemed to have happened while I was waiting so after a few retries I removed the side of the case an flicked the battery to the bios, as instructed to do as if installing a new bios as found at:

http://www.abit-usa.com/downloads/bioshelp.php

Thankfully things seemed to work as normal, I still got the lovely L 9 99 99 crap but this time I couldn't boot from a CD so I can't install anything. I have checked in the bios and set boot priorities too Floppy then Cd Rom etc
so it's not that.

Any advice greatly appreciated, if it helps I use a Abit V17 MOBO

, install seemed to work fine, until initial boot, when the now all too familiar grub error 21 popped it's head up

If you were able to install Linux and when you reboot you get that grub error, then your BIOS is finding your hard drive.

You seem to have a problem with your grub configuration. Where did you install grub? Where did you install Linux? Was it to a primary partition? Did you install grub to the master boot record? Did you install Windows after Linux?

You can't just change the boot loader to Lilo. You will have to install Lilo to the Boot record and the drive that you are wanting to boot.

This post is a month old. Are you still having problems with it?

Also after you installed (booted) from your CD drive did you make booting from Hard Drive available in your BIOS so the OS will boot?

I found a way to install linux on the sata drives but I had to delete the arrays, so I've bought an ide hard drive and installed linux on that, kept windows on the raid configuration. Everything seems ok now, just struggling to tweak things to match my sound card.