I was having problems with an old install of Mandrake (8.1) and decided to do a fresh install of 9.1. Everything appeared to install ok but when the system reboots after installation, it hangs and puts up the message:

Reboot and select proper boot device
or insert boot media in selected boot device

During installation, I checked the boot options and it had the proper device selected. Any ideas?

Did you create a boot floppy during installation? (I am not sure whether Mandrake 9.1 lets u do that but most distros do) Use the floppy to boot up Mandrake so that you can maybe reset the boot up options through its GUI tool.

If this doesnt help, pls describe the boot manager you are using, your partition tables, etc so that we can have a better look on it.

if you can boot from a floppy, try su'ing to root and running 'lilo' once it has booted. That should rewrite the MBR on your hard disk, which may help. DO NOT do that if you're dual booting with (! lilo).

I've booted with the cd and used "Rescue" to write the boot loader. That still did not fix the problem. This is a scsi hd. I was thinking a low-level format of the hd might clear up the problem. Anyone know of a tool to do that?

Thanks for the ideas.

ok, I got it to work.

I reinstalled mandrake and this time when it cam to partitioning I:
- switched to expert mode
- cleared all partitions
- created one large partition the size fo the disk
- formatted the parge partition
- cleared the partition
- switched to normal mode
- did the auto allocate
- switched to expert mode
- formatted each of the 3 partitions

now it boot just fine.

One other thing I noticed was in toward the final steps of the install, it did the "Install Bootloader" w/o any input from me. Also I could not check the ACPI option in the Config Menu->Boot Loader menu.