Can not boot from HD after install
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
Reply to: