I posted this to the newsgroup linux.debian.user yesterday. But now I'm subscribed to this list. I apologize if you've seen this before. ---- Good evening all,
I have just completed the installation of Debian/Linux 2.1 on my old Compaq laptop. When I finished it would not boot from the hard drive. The error I got was Non-System disk or disk error Replace and press any key when ready I insert the Boot Floppy and it boots fine (albeit real slow). Could someone give me a remedy to this? More detailed info: This computer has a retrofitted ~800 MB hard drive and in it's previous incarnation (up until last night) it was a DOS machine which had the On-Track Disk Manager software installed to translate the big disk for DOS. The debian installation balked at the partition step, it said the disk was factory fresh or screwed up. I assumed it might be the Disk Manager partition voodoo, so... I did not have the disk for Disk Manager so I did not properly uninstall it, but rather simply repartitioned the drive with DOS fdisk. Same message from the installation program so I shelled out and ran cfdisk directly. This worked great. I partitioned the drive the way I wanted with a ~768MB hda2 at the beginning of the drive and a ~8MB swap hda1 at the end. The rest of the installation script went smoothly until the reboot when I discovered the above. I have a nagging suspicion that the hda2 needs to be reduced or that the boot record still has the Disk Manager strap in it. I'm going to set it aside in case I have to start over. Any guidance would be appreciated. TTFN, Matthew Denson
