System will not boot

[Dennis Kibbe]

On Friday 05 July 2002 07:55 pm, Elburn@aol.com wrote:
> At the install fest it was determined that I had bad memory in my old
> system and could not install. (I am ashamed to admit that I don't know the
> name of the gentelman who spent all day trying to help me, but it was to no
> avail, my machine was beyoud help).  To make a long soriey short:  I
> replaced the memory, replaced old drives with an 80gb western digitial. 
> The bios doesn't recognize this drive, however Mandrak's boot CD finds the
> disk recognizes it as 78gb and proceeds to install clean.  now the machine
> will not boot as bios doesn't find the drive.
>
> Soulations:
>
>        1.  Upgrade BIOS (Can't till monday there are closed till then)
>
>        2.  Work around?  (here is where you tell me how to do this without
> upgrading
>              bios).
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Al Templeton

Al,

How old is the motherboard? I could imagine that simple can't handle that big 
a drive. A work around might be (and I'm guessing here) to reinstall and when 
asked if you want to install lilo on the MBR, choose it install it from the 
floppy instead.

Also, look in the BIOS, how is it id'ing the hdd? If you can set it to auto 
then the BIOS may see some of the drive.

- Dennis