Solved! But, it isn't pretty...
This appears to be a K8V BIOS issue... In the BIOS, under the hard drive section, there is an option for LBA... The choices are "auto" and "disabled"... There is no option for "enabled"... Apparently, there is no way, in the BIOS, to force LBA on... Every time you boot the BIOS looks to see if the drive is formatted with LBA enabled... If it is, LBA is turned on... If not, it is turned off... You can view this at the second black boot screen, which lists all the properties of the system... The screen where it asks you to hit <ESC> to boot... So, check this out: -> Zero MBR (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1) and then reboot... LBA is on... -> Boot random Linux ISO... Using previously cleared MBR, make a partition table and then reboot... LBA is off... -> Boot Windows 98 floppy... Use floppy to write a new MBR (fdisk /mbr) and then reboot... LBA is on... What have we learned? Somehow, the Linux way of writing the partition table is messing things up... So now what do we do? -> Boot random Linux ISO... Using existing Windows MBR, make a new partition... Format partition however you want and then reboot... LBA is on... Observe: With no LBA: Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 155061 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes With LBA: Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes They are both the same size but they have a different reported geometry... Anyways, I have rebooted several times to make sure that this works... I have no idea what LBA is exactly, or why we need it, but it looks like this is the problem... Hopefully Asus will release a new BIOS that allows you to force LBA on... Note there is an option in the installer for Debian to write a whole new MBR... I think this option also causes this error... I sure hope there is an easier solution! Mike (Xyzzy)
