I am installing red hat 9 onto my second hard drive. I disconnect my first hard drive. I successfully install linux onto the second hard drive. Upon restart, I receive the error message
"boot failure
insert BOOT diskette into a:
press any key when ready"

I chose all the defaults when installing red hat. One default I noticed was the MBR. Any suggestions? I can get in with linux rescue to fix things if necessary.

try booting with your other drive installed.
if it still doesnt work, use the same hardware setup, but change the bios to boot from your 2nd hard drive

when you restarted the system.....u had this linux installed drive only or you plugged one more drive and made the linux one secondary(master/slave)???

regards

i only have one hard drive attached by IDE cables at a time. The first hard drive with windows xp on it boots correctly every time. When I disconnect the windows hard drive and connect the linux hard drive to the IDE cable and try to boot I receive the errors listed above. I would dual boot but that is another can of worms that i tried to tackle before to no avail. it looks like i have to mount the grub boot loader which i have been trying to do since the last post. i'm not sure if i'm mounting the grub boot loader correctly. thanks for the help so far, i'll keep trying. anymore help is appreciated.

this error is indicating that your machine is not getting booted by your hard disk.
next according to the booting sequence its looking for some boot disk floopy in your 'A' drive and hence throwing the above error message.

so the error seems to me is that you haven't installed your bootloader in the MBR. You might have installed that into /root.

if its the case then reboot the maching with the 1st cd of your distribution and re-install the boot loader into MBR.

recovering bootloader: http://www.gnulinuxclub.org/index.ph...=170&Itemid=31

regards

Why would you disconnect the drive so you can attach another, is it because you have just one IDE port ? Changing IDE cables frequently might lead to broken IDE pins and I wouldn't suggest you do that !

Dual boot is always posible, you just need to know how ! The error message you get something I've never come across. BOOT diskette ??!! Are you trying to boot from floppy or did you use rawrite.exe to some image to boot sector or what is it ?

Connect the linux disk and boot off with the installtion CD. Boot off in rescue mode and mount your linux installation on /mnt followed "chroot /mnt". Rerun grub-install or use the grub command and re-install grub to the mbr.

Like I said, dual boot is easy and something you can implement without modifying the existing installtion. If interested and if you have succeded in booting into linux, come back and shout. I'd see, what we can do to get you dual booting xp and linux.

Thanks for the information. I would be very interested in dual booting. Last time I tried I got it to dual boot once, then every other time windows xp was seeing the linux drive as foreign and would keep rebooting in a repeated cycle getting me nowhere. So, once I figure this out, I will come back and tackle that.

Here is new information concerning the single hard drive linux installation I have been trying. I did this so far:

fdisk -l
mkdir /tmp/mnt
mount /dev/hdb2 /tmp/mnt
chroot /tmp/mnt
grub-install /dev hdb2

// at this point, I receive this error message:
"The file /boot/grub/stage2 not read correctly"

When I try to boot without the linux cd, the error message I get is as follows:

PXE-E53 no boot filename received

It sounds like grub is in the wrong position which is what a few of you have said already. I do not know what that error about not reading the stage2 is about though.
I will check back later if any of you know what that means.

Thanks so far

I also have noticed that the hard drive is not being recognized in the bios. It flashes so fast I did not pay attention before. I am going to try and set the pins in the back of the hard drive and see if bios will read the hard drive then.

post the output of
#fdisk -l
and
your grub.conf/lilo.conf whatever you have.

regards

Edit: the way to find solution to your problem: post the error statement as such in www.google.com/linux. e.g post "The file /boot/grub/stage2 not read correctly" as such in www.google.com/linux.