Boot problem

[Eric "Shubes"]

I stopped by Joe's this afternoon. The good new is we got his DSL modem 
working.

There is still a problem booting though. We're not entirely sure how it 
got to the state it's in, but here's what we observe.

1) There are two drives (hda, hdb) on the computer. Booting from hda was 
  not working, so the computer was booting W98/bootmagic from hdb. We 
disabled hdb in the bios so that wouldn't happen.

2) Knoppix sees both drives aok, regardless of bios settings. We ran 
qtparted, changed active partition from hda5 to hda6, committed. No 
problem (I don't think the active flag really matters to lilo).

3) His mandriva '/' partition is hda6. We mounted it, chrooted to it, 
mounted /proc, and ran lilo. All appeared to be ok. lilo.conf parameter 
boot=hda was specified, so lilo should have updated the MBR on hda.

So far, so good. Now for the weirdness.

In the BIOS setup, auto was selected for hda. When booting, the search 
for device was successful, and showed the hda model name (hdb no longer 
showed, as we specified 'none' for it). However, in the BIOS boot 
summary information, it shows 'none' for primary master (hda)!! I've 
never seen such a thing. Actually, we noticed this before disabling hdb. 
With no hdb and no apparent hda, it couldn't find a system disk and froze.

So I guess the question is, how can the bios auto detect the device, yet 
  not have it listed in the summary? I suspect something in the MBR 
isn't quite right, but don't know exactly what it could be (and 
subsequently how to fix it). lilo *should* (appeared to) have rewritten 
the MBR, and the partition table appeared to be ok, as qtparted updated 
it. What else is in the MBR that could be causing this?

There is a backup of the original MBR (on hda6) which lilo made on its 
initial installation. Without knowing what the problem is though, I'm 
hesitant to restore the MBR from that backup. Should we give that a try?

Joe has several partitions on the drive and has bits and pieces of 
valuable information on each of them so until he gets that copied off, 
we don't want to try anything very drastic.

Any ideas are appreciated. We're stumped at this point.
-- 
-Eric 'shubes'