I just installed KnoppMyth R5A22 (after trying R5A16) and after I reboot and remove the disc it just shows a flashing underscore. I have erased and reinstalled the software over and over to no avail. Below are my following settings:

Pentium 4 (3.0GHz) (LGA 775)
MSI (Micro-Star International) 865PE Neo3 Series
2x256 PC3200 RAM
300GB SATA Hard Drive (with KnoppMyth)
160GB SATA Hard Drive (with Windows XP)
SAPPHIRE Radeon 9550SE 128MB 64-bit DDR AGP 4X/8X Video Card

I'm new to Linux, although I'm not averse to tinkering, but I do needed detailed info if you want me to do some stuff (ie. Editing this 'LILO' thing I keep hearing about.) Keep in mind, I'm using SATA hard drives which may be to blame, however, I imagine there is a workaround.

Thank you in advance.

Did you go into your BIOS and reconfigure it to boot from the hard drive?

Yes, I had it set up to boot from the CD-Rom and then the hard drive. If I swap the hard drives in the bios it will boot from the second drive (with windows xp on it) no problem.

I disabled the CD-Rom drive just now so that the KnoppMyth drive would be the first one to load and I'm back to a blinking underscore on a black screen.

The Motherborth Logo comes up and then it goes to the blinking underscore. No clue why.

Have you turned on the motherboard diagnostic messages? Spash screens are pretty, but spectaculaly uninformative when you're troublshooting a problem like this...

I haven't yet. I'm busy for the next 90 minutes but i'll do it then. Is there anything in particular that I should be looking for?

Something like "no bootable disk found".

Okay, I changed some settings in the BIOS so that it won't show the logo, it will just show the POST messages. However, they moved a bit too fast for me to read them.

My MoBo is clearly reading the two hard drives though.

Also, I should mention that I now have it setup to go 300gb drive (knoppmyth)>DVDR>160gb drive (win xp).

It just seems to roll over the first two and then go to the windows drive. Odd.



(screenshots taken from a video from my canon )

I have solved the problem with a new problem...

Today I tried to fiddle with this once again and I discovered that by unplugging the WindowsXP hard drive (actually unplugging the SATA drive from the MoBo) it would actually start up off the Knoppix hard drive.

I have no clue why this is but I know that this worked for me. Oddly enough, when I plug the drive back in, it won't load in Knoppix, it will just roll over that drive into Windows. Looks like I'll have to open my case every time I want to switch OSes. Any ideas?

Sounds like the boot order in your BIOS is wrong.

If you use the F11 option to get the boot menu, does it allow you to select which drive to boot from? Can you select the knoppmyth drive doing this. That is what I was doing for a while dual booting win2000 and knoppmyth.

I will have to try that next time I load up my system.

I was having the same problem. I had it on A16 and A22. I was able to fix it by editing /etc/ilio.conf.
It had some junk like ":Part" or something like that on the second line that was causing it not to start.
Boot from the CD then exit to prompt.
Look for something like ":Part /dev/hdx1 :Typ 12" on the first few lines and place a # to comment it out, Save, Quit.
Then run Lilo (I forgot this part and cost me an hour or two) Then exit, umout hda1, and reboot from the hard drive.


This worked for me. I hope it helps.

had the same problem with my machine not booting. tried Mr_Scary's fix and it worked!!

not sure what that did, but it boots now and lets me finish the install. anyone out there know why the ":Part" line is in the /etc/lilo.conf file?

I found (using R7) that this happens when there are other partitions on the drive. I had two other partitions and I got two lines I had to delete. I did another install with only one other partition line. Installing with no other partitions worked just fine and I didn't have to apply the fix.