install cd hanging at boot on checking partitions

[Kendall Shaw <queshaw@pacbell.net>]

Hi,

Using isolinux woody cd, the boot hangs after:

something ttyS01 something

If I boot with bf24 to use a 2.4 kernel, it hangs after:

 hdc: something 70324/16/63
 ...
 /dev/ide/something same as hdc [PTBL] 4298/255/63

(The actual cylinder counts are different than I print above).

Now, I don't know what to do.

Installing gentoo, though I got slightly farther.

Assuming that I'm going to go with debian, I will describe what
happens in gentoo since it's all at the non-distribution specific
level.

I installed gentoo on the drive (actually it was attached to my
current debian system at the time), upto just before I install a boot
loader.

If I try to install grub by typing "grub", the computer hangs.

So, I tried lilo instead and included:

lba32
...
image=/boot/vmlinux
   append="hdc=4298,255,63 hdd=cdrom hde=cdrom"

Now, I no longer get the [PTBL] message, but it still hangs after the
last drive.

I have a pentium 3 on a via chipset mb and a maxtor ata100 pci ide adapter.

 hda: maxtor 40GB
 hdb: maxtor 120GB
 hdc: maxtor 40GB
 hdd: cdrom
 hde: cdrom

hde is on the ide adapter. hda and hdc are the same drive model. linux
is installed on hdb in 3 partitions. 

I tried different kernels also: 2.4.18 and 2.4.20-pre10-ac1, but I get
the same results.

What else can I try?

Kendall