My booting problem has been solved. In case anyone else has a similar problem, here is what was wrong, how I fixed things, and what I would do differently if I were to start over again.
To recap, the problem was that after installing slink, I could boot from the boot floppy, but not from the hard disk. When trying to boot from the hard disk, the system would hang just after the "Loading Linux................" message. The source of the problem is that slink uses, by default, a kernel stored as a "bzimage." A perusal of the mailing list archives and other Debian documentation shows that this format is known to be problematic for certain machines. The case that is sited most often is the IBM Tecra laptop, so the problem is often referred to as the "tecra problem." Since I wasn't installing on a laptop of any kind, I initially didn't pay much attention to the discussions of the tecra problem. Later, as I got more desperate, I read it more carefully and decided that since my system was hanging up at the stage where the kernel is being uncompressed, this _was_ the likely source of the problem. To solve the problem, I booted from the floppy, ungzipped and untarred the kernel source directory, configured the kernel, and remade the kernel as a "zimage" rather than a bzimage. After reinstalling the newly-made kernel and modules in the appropriate places (and rerunning lilo just to be sure), the system booted perfectly from the hard drive. Two days of frustration eliminated! Two more things that might be of interest: There is a tecra-specific version of slink that comes on its own cdrom. Before recompiling the kernel, I tried to install the tecra version on a second hard disk, but it wouldn't install. The software couldn't find the kernel image file on the cd, even though it was right where it was supposed to be. I'll have to file a bug report on that. After I got things working, I went into the BIOS to change the boot order back to "C,A" and saw an interesting setting that allows me to change the behavior of the A20 gate. The default for my machine is to have this setting at "Fast," but it can be changed to "Normal." Since the tecra problem has something to do with the A20 gate, I suspect that if I had changed this setting to "Normal" before installing, everything would have been fine. As I now have a working system, I have no desire to test this theory; but if I were to reinstall from scratch again, the first thing I would do is change this setting. -- Mark Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED]