Help: problem with booting from HD
Hi all,
I am new to Linux. after studied various different distributions I
decided to go with Debian. Having spent two days playing with it, now I
have to ask for help :( I just bought a PC and download the 6 disks for
base systems (rescue, devie, and base14-1 thru base14-4) and made two
copies while I still have Windows95 on the hard drive. and did the base
system install according to the install guide on the web. when I was
doing the install i used cfdisk to partition the hard drive. i made
four primary partition (500mb for linux native, 500mb for linux native,
64mb for linux swap, and 900somethinb mb for DOS-32 bit) and marked all
but the linux swap as bootable. Install went thru without problem.
Now the problem is I can't boot from the hard drive. I can boot from the
custom boot floopy without problem, and log in as root, etc, and /dev/hda
is already mounted at that point. I did du and see that the install used
about 15MB, which i assume is correct. if i do shutdown, and reset the pc
or turn off and back on the pc, it will produce various kinds of errors.
most of the time it will get as far as "lilo, uncompress linux" and give
me a "crc error -- system halt" and at that point I can't even
alt-ctrl-del. at one point i got so frustrated, and just turned off the
machine, and the next morning turned it back on. miraculously it booted
from the hard drive. and I tried shutdown then the same thing happened,
and I had to boot from the floppy.
after that I did a couple of reinstalls and partitions of the hard disk
(with linux partitons only), and got the same system halt error.
now things got so screwed up, I don't even see the lilo prompt, it only
gives me a "1fa:" error
I read all the faqs and how-tos I can get and couldn't figure out the
problem. any idea/suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
ps: I can't get back to windows95 either. I can boot from a windows boot
disk and get to see the a: prompt, but the setup program won't run
because it won't recognize the hard drive. I read all 4 how-tos on
having both linux and windows partitions on the same disk, but am still
confused. also, is lilo automatically installed in the base-system debian
install? thank you again for any suggestion.
If you have any suggestion please cc me as well.
--
Ray Zhang ~{UESjLo~} ray@eris.umb.edu http://www.cnd.org/HYPLAN/ray/
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