im trying to set up debian without a cd or using the floppy drive (its busted) on my second hard drive. i resized the windows partition with partition magic to make room for the linux one, booted up the setup with loadlin, and i can get through the whole install. i put lilo on the second hard drive because its small and expendable (lost everything with lilo one time a few years ago) so i have to change the boot order in my bios to boot to linux. however, when i do this all i get is 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 which never stops. with a bit of finagling i can make it print 01 01 01 01 but i still cant get it to linux.

anyone have any ideas?

forgot, I had the same problem last month, trying to setup two hard drives to run W2K and SuSE. I to would get the LI then 40 going forever, to fix it I had to put LILO on hda instead of hdb.

Yes you will need to boot lil on your /mbr for it to load properly, I'm sure others have ways around this but I experience the same spamming number problem you did awhile back. Loading lilo to mbr fixed it as well.