I have an old system that I am turning into a server. I had put a new hard drive into the system and the computer has been having problems detecting it. When the bios tries to detect the hard drive it just sits there and says “Detecting Secondary Device.” So I went into the bios menu and told it that there was no device on Secondary Master. Then I put in the Red Hat 9 CD and installed it onto the hard drive without any problems. Now I am trying to get the computer to boot from the hard drive but I get the same problem. I tried the boot floppy but it starts to load then restarts the computer. How can I get it to boot from the hard drive?

Old BIOSes have limitations that can cause problems with newer drives. One problem I've seen is an inability to read disks larger than 32Gb. The boot sector may have to be wholly within the first 1024 (?) cylinders of the disk for the system to boot.