Ok, I've been trying to get this going for 3 days.

Machine: Athlon 1800 with pc2100 512mb. WD 160gb Hard drive. Yes it is on end of cable. Yes it is in my ide 0 position.

I downloaded R5D1 and tried this one first.

It will not let me do Auto. I get the line 609 Syntax error.

I tried manual. Partitioned the drive, but noticed the reason i must not be able to do auto install is because the install is recognizing the drive as hde. If I boot with Knoppix, it recognizes it as hda with no problem.

Anyways, I do 4 partitions, setting hde1 as bootable at 2.5 gb, and a swap drive, hde2 at 1.5gb, hde3 as a 20gb and hde4 as the rest.

The rest of the config appears to go well. I run the install, it formats the hd bootable and appears to load. I get the all done, enter on OK, and it takes me to a command prompt. I have to force the restart.

When I restart, Nothing, it POSTS fine and gets to the point where it should boot, and NOTHING.

I tried R5C7 and got the same thing for everything.

The hard drive I'm using originally had a dual boot of Fedora and Windows XP on it.

What motherboard are you using? You say your drive is "in my ide 0 position" - On which controller? Primary/Secondary, some type of RAID on the MB, etc.? Is the drive jumpered for Master, or are you attempting to use Cable Select (CS)?

Set the jumper for Master, make sure the drive is attached to the Primary IDE controller.

It's an ECS k75a3 (i think)

but what I meant is it is the primary boot drive. I don't have the cable confused for position. Been verified.

I've tried both CS and set to master. Currently it is back to master.

I've tried the install multiple times. Each attempted install has been a result of a single change to avoid too many variables with each install.

Hmm, no hits when I Google that. How many IDE connectors does it have?
I believe your drive is not plugged into the primary IDE controller, since Knoppmyth is finding it as hde (which would be Master on the tertiary IDE controller - perhaps an on-board RAID controller, or an add-in card?). Not sure why Knoppix would see it as hda, though.

How is the boot order defined in your BIOS?

Edit: Have you tried the suggestions here? http://wiki.knoppmyth.net/index.php?page=WillNotBootAfterInstall

Of course i have.

Yes it is. There are 4 controllers. Mine is installed in the first one. Knoppmyth finds it as hde, but both Knoppix and Fedora had no problem recognizing it as HDA.

I know it is in the right spot.

Have you used the CD as a rescue disk and rerun lilo by hand? Searching for "lilo" and "chroot" should turn up a numhber of threads like this:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... hroot+lilo
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... hroot+lilo
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... hroot+lilo

Depending on your BIOS you may also want to make sure the "bootable" flag is set in fdisk.