After installing a fresh copy of Knoppmyth the system will hang on the first boot. The hard drive lights go on and flicker for about twenty seconds. But then they stop and there is no indication that anything else is going on after that. I have let the system sit overnight with no change.

My hardware is as follows:
A7N266
512 MB RAM
AMD 2000+
Geforce 4200
PVR-250
Western Digital 120 gig
HP DVD-writer 300i

I have tried the auto install and manual install. In the manual install lilo was installed in one attempt on the mbr and in another attempt on hda1 (same partition as knoppmyth was installed).

I am still new to this, so I apologize if there is a rather simple solution.

Does it lock at the BIOS before booting the KnoppMyth or after the boot process starts? If when KnoppMyth starts to botot, have you tried:
Use the CD to boot.
Once booted <ctrl><atl><f1>
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
chroot /mnt/hda1
lilo -v
exit
reboot

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I tried your suggestion (quick response, btw, thanks!). I get the following message:


To answer your question, it stops just before I would expect to see lilo start (after bios POST, before OS loads).

Well, with your help and a little intuitive thinking I think I figured out. Not sure, though.

There was two lines at the very beginning of lilo.conf that had 'part:' in the beginning, the rest I don't remember. I removed those just to see what happened, saved the file and did a 'lilo -v'. System booted right into linux and started the configuration (it almost made me cry, lol).

My familiarity with linux isn't enough to understand the purpose and importance of those first two lines. For now, I will see how this works without it.

Thanks, cesman for pointing me in the right direction!

Make sure that your hard drive is jumpered for cable select NOT as master or slave. I'm not sure if this is a WD thing or a nVidia thing but the BIOS won't see it as a bootable drive if it's not set to CS.

Symptoms are:

- Install seems to write to the HD just fine

- You can boot from the CD/DVD drive and once you do you can mount the HD as a valid FS.

- BIOS messages (which you may have to do something to see) indicate that it can't find a bootable disk.