Hi,

Thanks for everyones help.

There were several things that were weird. First the bad 
memory(suggestion from a previous message). Second, the hard drive was 
master and the cdrom slave but the harddrive was not jumpered correctly. 
I put them both as master which made things much faster anyway but still 
didn't fix the boot problem.

Thanks to the suggestion/pointer below. Third, after reading all about 
the BIOS/Linux/IDE size and recognician and interactions(DISK HOW-TO 
etc), I found two settings in BIOS that I changed. I used the BIOS for 
'HDD Detection' and put the drive in LBA mode which I assume is the same 
as the lba32 line in lilo.conf. This turned the sizing to 1023/64/63 
which matches what linux wants. Previously...

hda: ST32140A ATA Disk
ide0 at Ox1f0-0x1f7 0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: ST32140A 2015m x/128kb Cache CHS=4095/16/163 *
Partition check
hda: [PTBL][1023/64/63] hda1 hda2:**

* old setting
** does not match what linux wants
This whole thing apparently is the 1024 block? problem for 2.1GB hard 
drives.

The second setting was to set the
IDE BLOCK MODE to ENABLED.

Don't really get what was going on exactly but this is what I found.

Eric


foodog wrote:

> Eric Richardson wrote:
> 
>>Hi Again,
>>Nope, no joy.
>>
>>With memory that tests okay, the install goes fine and then when I
>>reboot I get the perpetual.
>>
>>L 40 40 40 40 ... forever until I hit the reset switch.
>>
> 
> Have you tried making/using a boot floppy?  Does it do the same?
> Doing some Google searches; seems to be consensus that "L 40 40"  means
> "media problem" - not necessarily bad media tho'.
> 
> Another possibility is the problem was created by using a "diskmanager"
> program at some point. 
>  
> Here's one suggestion I found:
> http://www.uklug.net/archive/2000-December/007083.html
> 
> Here's some Swedish Debian users who seem to be discussing uninstalling
> a bootmanager (great for Swedish Chef impersonations, or pick out the
> relevent english buzzwords for clues)
> http://www.linuxarkivet.nu/mlists/debian-user-swedish/0010/msg00024.html
> 
> 
>>I have a functioning machine so I can copy programs to floppy to run on
>>the other box. Are there any other diagnostic tools I can run for the
>>CPU, board, PCI etc?
>>
>>The cdrom front it is an ATAPI. The cable goes from the Number one slot
>>to the CD and then to the hard drive. Is this correct?
>>
> 
> I hate ambiguous cables..  You *can* get it backwards and it won't
> work.  Does the system see the cdrom during bootup?  If it doesn't it
> may be backwards.  I don't know of a surefire way to tell; I always
> start with "red stripe to the right" and it works better than 50% of the
> time...
> 
> Do you have the hard disk set to be IDE master and the CD set to slave? 
> If you don't, that could cause probs.  If you've got another IDE channel
> and cable you could try segregating them and setting them both to
> master.  POST messages (power on self test) messages are the best easy
> indication if your devices are seen correctly.
> 
> 
>>It also seems the connector can go either way. What the rule on that?
>>Is there anyway I can test the CDROM?
>>
>>Thanks for the help.
>>Eric
>>
> 
> Good luck,
> Steve
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