Hi gang, What else should I look for? I have a brand new machine with a 40 GB Fujitsu HD and I am installing a Slackware 8.1 distro with speakup and an external doubletalk. The installation was made from a set of diskettes and went without a hitch. The root partition was large because I need a lot of space for /tmp and perhaps /var in addition to the usual miscellaneous stuff. It is about 4 GB and is the first partition. I marked it active with fdisk just in case, but installed lilo to the MBR anyway. The software and the general configuration is similar to my own system. I made a couple of boot disks during the installation process, and it is fortunate that I did, because the system will not boot from the HD. It boots fine from the floppies I made, but not from the HD. I checked the bios setup program (a royal pain in the ass) and saw that the HD was detected as the primary master, and that it was selected as the second priority boot device, right behind the floppy. I checked and double checked the installation (in fact I did it more than once) being certain to install the kernel from the installation boot floppy, but nothing. No error messages, no nothing. It acts as though the HD were simply not present,. and yet the bios recognizes it, it is on the list of devices to boot from, and it works fine when booting from a floppy. Well maybe not entirely fine. One more symptom. When I boot up from a floppy and pay attention to how it is working, the HD is extremely sluggish. Checking the data transfer rate with hdparm -t, I get about 10% the rate I get on my own system. Also, the hdparm command is unable to set the DMA option with the -d1 option. What happens is that the hdparm command causes a 60 second delay after which the system resumes functioning but without the DMA setting changed. I am dealing with some idiots at a computer store who are convinced the problem is with Linux, and I am equally stubborn in insisting that it is not. Any notion of what I might be overlooking? This is incredibly frustrating. I gave the folks at the store permission to wipe out my root partition if they needed to, hoping they would put a DOS or Windows OS on it to check it out, but they happen to have a Redhat 6.0 disk lying around and are spinning their wheels trying to replace Slackware 8.1 with Redhat 6.0 because they suspect there is a hangup when Linux tries to use a raid personality. Thanks for any ideas. Chuck -- The Moon is Full So visit me sometime at http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh
