> during
> the boot process, the system will eventually say it's got a
> problem with the hard drive.  i suspect that it's actually
> complaining about not being able to find something (mbr?) to
> boot from.
Can you give us the exact message?

I had something like this happen with the Caldera OpenLinux (COL) CD I got
at HPW 2000, on an old 486 whose CMOS battery is dead (no one misses this
system anymore). I had wondered if the CMOS battery was the problem, but
that didn't make sense. Turns out, I was not telling COL to write LILO to
the MBR, IIRC. Perhaps COL saw that the hard drive had another OS on it?

And, are you having RHL fdisk and reformat the disk?

>             (btw, i really don't want to have to boot from
> diskette....)
Sure as you do, some helpful soul will eject the disk, and another will
decide to borrow it so they can sneakernet a file. That's funny, Windows
says it wasn't formatted. Fortunately, Windows offered to format it for
me... Rumor has it you can avoid that problem by labeling it "Linux format
diskette; will NOT work with Windows".

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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