My computer is currently in an unusable state. I am borrowing my Dad's computer to write this!
The story in summary form: 1. Purchased a new 15Gig IBM ATA/100 hard drive. Hooked it up as 1st drive. BIOS detects okay. 2. fdisk complains that there is no known partition table on it. I get fdisk to create one, as well as partitions, and write to disk. All is well again. 3. Many trials and tribulations later I get Debian Linux (potato) successfully installed on new drive. Using custom kernel 2.4.0-test9 --- upgraded a few packages to woody in line with this. (I needed 2.4 for LVM and ReiserFS.) Created boot floppy for it which successfully booted it several times. 4. I actually wanted the new drive as the third disk, so I swapped disks and cables around. Got BIOS to re-detect the drives, which it did okay. 5. Used Debian rescue disk to boot. I hoped to use the rescue disk to run lilo from in order to make the new drive bootable again. But lilo failed. The rescue disk seems to use the lilo executable on the IBM drive, and this failed. It gave the error message: /target/sbin/lilo: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: version `GLIBC_2.2' not found (required by /target/lib/libc.so.6) I'm not sure what the problem is here. It could be because on the IBM drive installation (/target) I upgraded a few packages to woody. I could be because /target did not have mounted /usr or /var (and I can't mount them without the 2.4 kernel). Anyway, whatever the reason, I can't get lilo to work so I can't boot the partition. I can't even use a commandline option to boot from the rescue disk with /dev/hdc1 as root, because again, I need my custom 2.4 kernel so I can get LVM and ReiserFS stuff so that /usr and /var will be mounted. 6. I swapped cables around so that my new IBM drive became the first drive again, and got the BIOS to re-detect the disks. This way I hoped to use my custom boot disk for booting the new drive, which I created when it was /dev/hda. The kernel started booting okay with this, but it couldn't find a partition table on the IBM drive! "Unknown partition table" the kernel complained. This is the same problem it had at the very beginning of this story. I am not about to use fdisk to recreate a partition table and wipe my disk. 7. I swapped the cables over again a few times and it seems the partition table is readable when I make the new drive /dev/hdc but unreadable when I make it /dev/hda. So that it the current state of play. I can't think what the problem is with the partition table being unreadable. I suspect it might be some problem with the motherboard. In which case the best thing to do is to stick with /dev/hdc. But how can I get it bootable as this? How can I get a lilo which will work and set up the boot sector properly? Please cc any replies directly to me. Thanks, Mark. _/~~~~~~~~___/~~~~~~____________________________________________________ ____/~~_____/~~__/~~__________________________Mark_Phillips____________ ____/~~_____/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ____/~~\HE___/~~__/~~\APTAIN_____________________________________________ ____/~~______/~~~~~~____________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ "They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them!"