Unable to boot from hard drive

[Mike Miller <gte296k@prism.gatech.edu>]

Hi, i have a problem booting from my hard drive after installation.

I've installed the stable release on a clean hard drive, no problems
with installation.  If i boot from a floppy or a cd, the filesystem is
intact on the hard drive partitions.  The hard drive is a large one,
but the BIOS autodetects the size and geometry fine.

I have no problem with reinstalling and trying again; i've already
reinstalled four or five times, tried different partitioning schemes.
Basically, here's what i've determined so far:

If i boot with no floppy or cd, i get a no system disk error message.
The O'Reilly Running Linux book mentions this message, and suggests a
failed or incorrect lilo installation, or no partition marked as
bootable.  I've tried messing around with the lilo.conf, changing
settings in there, but i still get the same message.  I've also tried
a bunch of other boot loaders (the 'install-mbr' util from the debian
cd, SBM from btmgr.sourceforge.net, and GRUB), and i get no results
with those as well.  Finally, if i try to boot from a floppy, but load
the kernel on my hard drive from the boot loader, it either can't find
the kernel image or can't read the hard drive.

And yes, even though the bios seems to have no problem with my hard
drive, i have a small hda1 partition for the /boot directory, which is
marked bootable in cfdisk.

-- 
   \  /  Mike Miller   \   fudu00@netscape.net
    \/    GATech - CmpE \   gte296k@prism.gatech.edu
   \/\/    CS1322 TA     \   sarge@cc.gatech.edu
   /\/\