Yes WD drives are picky bastards and if you have it jumpered to MA and there is no drive on the same channel it may not work.

You may want to check your terminalogy you are saying you have a serial lead and have checked the jumpers, with serial drives (SATA) they don't use jumpers and the auto-installer is known to have problems with SATA drives.

You may just want to clear up what sort of lead you are using a serial lead or a ribbon (flat and wide about 40 cables across) and also how your drives and connected in the machine.

_________________
Girkers

These aren't SATA devices. The hard disk is jumpered as the master and the CD as the slave on IDE channel #1. None of this has changed from when the machine was previously running just fine. The BIOS sees the HD, as does the KnoppMyth installer (which reads its size correctly and carves it up into appropriate-sized partitions, etc). It seems pretty likely that this is a LILO issue...I can easily access the HD by quittingh out of the installer. I've tried various solutions from the forums without success, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time until I get it right.

If I want to nuke the existing partitions via fdisk, how do I do that? fdisk has a command for deleting partitions, of coure, but it doesn't list the partitions for me, and I can't tell it to delete them if I don't know what they are.

I think that message comes before LILO. I'd look carefully at the setup of the hard disk and the CD-ROM device.

I see you are setting "master" and "slave" on the drives. Are you using a cable with blue, grey and black connectors? If so, this cable supports "cable select" and you could set your drives to "CS" mode. But you have your CDROM on the end of the cable, which is usually the position for the "master" when using cable select. I wonder if your motherboard is confused at the conflict between the positions of the drives on the cable vs. the way you have them configured.

Can you change the cable to make the hard disk on the end, and try it? Then try changing both drives to "CS" mode with the same configuration.

_________________
Do you code to live, or live to code?
Search LinHES forum through Google

KnoppMyth prefers the set up the HDD on the primary chain as the master and the CD-ROM on the secondary chain as the master. This is merely a suggestion and what KnoppMyth is looking for by default.

_________________
Girkers

I know it sounds screwy, but with the old box which has a WD drive as /dev/hda, the BIOS simply would not detect it as a bootable device until I jumpered it CS. It took me _days_ to figure out that this was the problem. It's a relatively easy thing to try and it could save you those days of pounding your head against the wall.

Yes! That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Try what tjc suggests and try "CS" mode, and make sure you get the hard disk as master and the CDROM as slave.

_________________
Do you code to live, or live to code?
Search LinHES forum through Google

I'm happy to report that it worked. It's weird, when I was running 5A16, I wasn't required to use CS mode, and that's what threw me off. Thanks a lot for your help, everybody--I couldn't have done it without you.